LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — The opioid crisis has a new way of destroying lives.
“It’s an infection that involves the valves in the heart. It can affect other parts of the heart, but it’s primarily on the valves,” Dr. Sami El-Dalati said of endocarditis.
Dr. El Dalati, the director of the UK Chandler Hospital Endocarditis program, and his team of researchers at UK meet frequently to discuss care methods for those inflicted with endocarditis. Their work over 2 ½ years has helped reduce the mortality rate in Kentucky from 17.5 percent to 9.9 percent. When El-Dalati began this type of work in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, he said the mortality rate dipped from 30% to 7. His team also believes opioid addiction has been the primary cause of endocarditis.
They studied the disease from 2009 through 2018 and noticed a massive increase as opioid addiction reached the crisis level.
“We were seeing 40 or so cases a year,” he said of their study in 2009 before opioid use began to balloon. “It was about 250 cases per year,” he stated about the rise in cases over the nine years.
Joshua Gilvin is one of the more recent cases. He was involved in a serious car wreck in 2001 and needed painkillers while recovering. But he developed an addiction to them. It got so bad that he was leaving the state to have prescriptions filled elsewhere. Once those ran low, he turned to heroin.
“I kept getting into situations where I was on the brink of death,” Gilvin said from home, less than two months after surgery to repair his case of endocarditis, which was done, in part, with a mechanical valve.
Gilvin was strung out and jailed for some time, and his family wanted nothing to do with him - often leaving him out of holiday gatherings. But the most significant blow, the one that caused the kind of pain no opioid can touch, came from his daughter.
“She wants to change her last name,” he was told by a family friend of his daughter’s decision. “That really hit home. That was the big one. I decided right then, that’s it, I have to make something of myself,” Gilvin recalled.
To do that, he had to get clean. A probation officer is checking on him to make sure he’s remaining drug-free. But he also had to commit to living life with powerful cravings but making a promise to himself not to satisfy those.
“After all of the work people put into me, and I put into myself, it would be a shame to be that 165-pound junkie on the street corner in Mt. Sterling again,” he said.
Gilvin has new teeth after the drugs rotted those away over time. Now, he’s got a new heart, too. One that could sustain him for quite a while.
“In his case, we put in a mechanical heart valve, which can last for 30 to 40 years,” Dr. El-Dalati said. If we keep up with him and keep him engaged in the medical care, he should be able to live through the life span of that valve,” he continued.
