Patient Story: Inside One of Cardiac Surgery’s Most Complex Operations

A few hours earlier, Regina Benner was boarding a flight home from vacation.

She’d spent a week in Alaska with her mother and 20-year-old daughter and was heading back to Philadelphia when a tight connection in Detroit sent the three of them hurrying through the airport. Her daughter ran ahead. Regina stayed back with her 84-year-old mother, pulling luggage and trying to make up time.

Then something changed.

She became dizzy. Her vision narrowed. Nausea set in. She could see her daughter calling her phone, but even reaching into her pocket felt like too much.

“I remember thinking I just needed to stop,” she says.

The next thing she knew, she was on the floor.

Airport employees went to call an ambulance, but she was determined to make her flight home.

By the time she landed in Philadelphia, she knew the episode was serious. She tells her daughter the truth.

“I knew I did not fall,” she says. “I knew I blacked out—I just did not know why and wanted to get home. I knew people would say for me to stay in Detroit to get checkout by EMS but I felt a need to get home.”

Her family hustles her from the airport to urgent care, where a doctor notices Regina is struggling with her balance and sends her to the Jefferson Abington Hospital. There, what initially seems like a familiar heart murmur leads to an ultrasound—and a much more startling conversation.

“They told me, ‘You’re going to have to have open-heart surgery,’” Regina remembers.

Her mind immediately jumps to everything outside the hospital room: work, clients, her family, her dog, even the fact that she hasn’t been home long enough to take a shower.

“I’m panicked,” she says. “I just want to go home.”

Then Dr. Chen walks into the room.

A complicated diagnosis, explained calmly

What Regina remembers most about her first conversation with Dr. Edward Chen, Professor of Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University and Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Jefferson Abington Hospital, is his demeanor.

He sits down. He listens. Instead of adding to the urgency, he slows the conversation down.

“He had a very calm voice,” Regina says. “I remember he said, ‘Let me explain what’s going on.’”

Dr. Chen orders additional testing and walks her through what comes next. Regina, a mental health therapist, is used to helping others navigate overwhelming moments. Now, she finds herself on the other side.

She recalls thinking, “I want this guy next to me at all times.”

Dr. Chen’s approach is deliberate.

“When [patients] come to see you, they only know their own story,” Dr. Chen explains. “They don’t yet know the whole spectrum of what’s possible.”

His role, as he sees it, is not simply to understand the medical complexity himself. It is to make that complexity understandable to the person sitting across from him by outlining all the necessary steps required for a person’s care in a systematic manner and then translating unfamiliar medical terminology into everyday language so that patients can better understand their overall situation and treatment plan.

Further testing shows Dr. Chen that although Regina’s heart is healthy, her aortic valve needs to be replaced. The operation is scheduled, but Regina can go home until the operation, arrange her clients, and prepare for surgery.

A highly specialized operation

On July 1, just over three weeks after passing out in the airport, Regina undergoes a Ross procedure.

The Ross procedure is one example of the kind of intricate cardiac surgery Dr. Chen confidently performs. Even so, operations involving the aorta can become even more complex.

The aorta is a keystone in your body. It carries blood flow from the heart to organs throughout the body. So, depending on which portion of a patient’s aorta needs repair, surgeons have to carefully interrupt and manage blood flow to the heart, brain, spinal cord, kidneys, or other organs during the operation.

“We took [Regina’s] pulmonary valve and moved it over to the aortic position to replace her defective aortic valve and native aortic root,” Dr. Chen explains. “And then we replaced the pulmonary valve with a homograft- tissue from a donor.

“These are some of the more complicated surgeries done in cardiac surgery in general,” Dr. Chen notes.

But for Dr. Chen, complexity doesn’t automatically dictate where care has to happen.

After spending much of his career in academic medicine, he comes to Jefferson Health and Jefferson Abington Hospital with the goal of bringing highly specialized cardiac surgery into a setting closer to where many patients already live.

What matters most, he says, isn’t whether a hospital sits on a university campus, but the expertise, culture, and team surrounding the patient. Jefferson Abington Hospital is an academic medical center in a community setting; we’re a hospital providing very high-level care in the suburbs.

Care that continues after surgery

By the end of August, Regina says she largely feels like herself again.

That surprises her, she notes.

“I really feared the worst,” she says.

During her recovery, Regina continues with follow-up care to ensure her heart and incisions heal. And, while those appointments may be standard practice, what stands out to her is how accessible her surgical team, including Dr. Chen, remains in the weeks after surgery.

Dr. Chen shares how important it is that a patient’s relationship doesn’t end when they leave the operating room.

“When you operate on someone,” he says, particularly in this patient population, “it’s a commitment that you make … indefinitely.”

That perspective is personal, too. Dr. Chen’s own father was diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm years ago and has never required surgery—an experience he says has made him especially thoughtful about when intervention is truly necessary.

It also informs a simple standard he has long shared with physicians training under him: “When you’re unsure what to do for a patient, think about the care you would want for your own mother, father, brother or sister.”

Regina sums up that level of care and dedication simply.

“I really trusted him.”

Now, she is focused less on surgery and more on the years ahead. Longevity runs in her family, and one reason the Ross procedure appealed to her was the chance to avoid lifelong blood-thinning medication and, she hopes, another major valve operation down the road.

To learn more about the cardiovascular program at Jefferson Abington Hospital, visit https://www.jeffersonhealth.org.