Chapters Transcript Video High School Senior’s Inspiring Journey at Baptist Health Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute My name is Sirikon Unsri. My friends call me Gemsa. I was recently a patient at the Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute of Baptist Health. I'm a student, graduating from high school, about to start college in a few days to become a physician. I love playing piano. I love working out. But I think to be honest, my favorite thing to do day to day just talk to my friends. We thought everything was fine and perfectly normal with my son until we took him for a routine pediatric visit a little more than a year ago. He was about to turn 18. This was an exit pediatric visit, simple check off paperwork kind of a visit. The pediatrician called us in and said, I think I hear something that I'm concerned about in terms of his heart sounds, and a series of tests followed an echocardiogram, an MRI scan and all of a sudden we had this diagnosis of a hole in his heart, an atrial septal defect. I was about to graduate high school. I was about to turn 18. That was already enough change for me. That something could be wrong with my heart, which is a very major organ. I was extremely shocked. My wife and I searched all across the country, and our first decision was we're going to leave Miami and we're going to go to some world renowned cardiac facilities and get this done where hundreds of patients are treated and where this is done on a daily basis. We came across Doctor Zin and Hashimoto. And as I started doing research in what they did, especially the robotic procedure, the minimally invasive procedure, and as we started studying their outcomes and their results and their research, it quickly dawned on us. Miami Cardiovascular Institute Baptist Health was probably the best place in the country and that we were fortunate enough to already be here, and that's how we set up appointments to meet with those doctors. Atrial septum defect is very common congenital heart disease. There is a hole at the membrane, uh, dividing the, the left and the right heart, and those uh this hole is causing abnormal flow in the heart. So usually these disease patients are relatively young, so we would like to avoid any invasive procedure for them. So we would like to do the surgeries through a small holes between the ribs. So the robot allows us to do that. So we stop his heart and then open the, the heart and, uh, close the hole with a patch. My first impression of Doctor Hashimoto was that he was extremely calm and collected. It felt like he was talking to me as a person, and he built that connection with me. And that's what I found really valuable. Last year, there was only 14,000 robotic heart surgery cases done in the whole world, and the congenital heart disease consists only of 2% of them. We are doing the largest number of robotic heart surgery here in Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute, so we can say that we are the pioneer in that field. Within a matter of days we were home, resting and recovering. Within a couple of weeks he was back at school. Happiness with Doctor Hashimoto is an understatement, and I realize the humanity in his work when on a Sunday morning we were not expecting Doctor Hashimoto to show up in the clinic, and lo and behold, Doctor Hashimoto shows up. And I asked him, what are you doing here on a Sunday morning, and he looked at me quizzically and he said, Why do you ask me that question? My patient is here. That was enough for me. I've always wanted to become a doctor. I truly appreciate what physicians do, and it has boosted my confidence to become a physician more so than ever. Created by
