My Life as a Pediatric Cardiologist and My Connection to the Children, Adults, and Families We Serve
By Frank Cecchin, MD
Director, Division of Pediatric Cardiology
Three main events inspired me to pursue my passion for pediatric cardiology.
My initial interest came from my own family history. My father died suddenly from a heart attack at 55 years of age, and when I decided to go into medicine, I was acutely interested in solving problems of the heart.
Then, when I was a resident in my pediatric cardiology rotation, I found myself beating all the fellows in our weekly diagnostic contests. My attending physician said, “Well, you must want to go into pediatric cardiology because you already know more than our fellows!”
The day that cemented my career path, however, was when I was starting out working in a public hospital in Houston, and we had a young woman come in who was homeless and in need of care. I just happened to be on the adult service at that time, and she was diagnosed with an untreated congenital heart disease. They proceeded to do surgery on her without involving the specialist on congenital heart disease, and when they opened her heart, they discovered they had the wrong diagnosis, and she unfortunately passed.
It just really showed me how important it is that congenital heart disease be handled by congenital heart disease experts. That moved me into all the work that I do now with adult congenital heart disease and inspired me to try and create a program in which teams of experts work together.
At NYU Langone, we have the best integrated congenital heart disease program in the country.
We evaluate fetuses, care for infants, treat children all the way to adulthood, and transition our patients to teams that are embedded within our group of experts.
In my clinic, I see children, but I also see adults with adult congenital heart disease in the same setting. It really provides continuity of care. Sometimes we even see parents and their children in the same clinic.
It’s a bit different from other great hospitals in which I’ve worked. We never had that type of care integration. Sometimes the children’s and adult cardiology centers were two separate institutions.
In my clinic, I see children, but I also see adults with adult congenital heart disease in the same setting. It really provides continuity of care. Sometimes we even see parents and their children in the same clinic.
When you work in this field, you don’t just treat the heart—you treat the whole person and get to know the whole family.
Parents are often very involved in their children’s care, and they often never give up in making sure their children are ok.
I went to the wedding of a man I treated years ago when he was a child. I’ve gotten to know his parents very well because of all the years I treated their son. Today, his brother is a medical student at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and is involved in research for pediatric cardiology and adult congenital heart disease.
It’s been amazing to see this family grow and see how involved they are in this man’s care. The brother even goes with him to his cardiology visits now, taking on the role that the parents once had. At NYU Langone, we get to know so many families on a personal level like this, and most of my attending physicians allow parents to contact them directly. I give my patients and their parents my cell phone number and let them know they can call me at any time.
When it comes to surgery, it isn’t just about survival here, but total quality of life.
NYU Langone has excellent surgical results across the board, but to us, it’s not simply about mortality. It’s the quality of the program and the quality of the surgery. How did you recover from your heart surgery? What are the residual effects?
We emphasize length of stay because that shows you how well your surgery went. If you’re in the hospital for three months after surgery, that usually means you had a lot of problems. But if you’re out of the hospital after three days, you know you’ve recovered nicely.
We have excellent survival rates, but we also get patients out of the hospital in the healthiest manner possible.
Things have also changed in the way congenital heart disease surgery is done. The strategy used to be to wait until a child was older before operating. Nowadays, we’re performing definitive operations on newborns, and we’re trying to completely fix the heart condition at that point.
After 30 years in this field, I’m still deeply and emotionally committed to the people we serve.
Recently, we had a 12-year-old who was transferred here with a severely dilated heart dysfunction and ended up being on ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation). We knew that once he could be treated for his arrhythmia, he would be ok.
In cases like this, one can go from either needing a major operation or dying to being almost completely healthy. So, we tried, and we were successful initially while he was on ECMO, but the arrythmia reoccurred because of a lot of technical difficulties. A few days later, we successfully eliminated it for good, he was home within two days, and his heart function is already 75 percent back to normal.
To treat this child, I spent a lot of time reading through literature to make sure I knew what I had to do to fix this problem.
Caring for pediatric cardiology patients is a big commitment. Even though I have 30 years of doing this, I prepared for that case as if it was my very first one to make sure I was going to be 100 percent successful.