Delivering Cutting-Edge Cardiovascular Care
The New Brunswick Heart Centre is the province's only tertiary cardiac care centre, providing cutting-edge care to a million Atlantic Canadians. The Foundation works with generous donors to equip the Heart Centre team with the latest technology, life-saving equipment and innovation advancing cardiac and vascular care for patients.
For Moncton’s Norma Melanson, multiple complications with her pacemaker and endocarditis - an infection of the inner lining of the heart chamber and valves - would see her in Saint John to be a first for the New Brunswick Heart Centre.
That’s when Dr. Pozeg stepped in. “He reconstructed the valves,” Norma explains. Surviving the surgery, Norma later slipped into a coma. After 62 days in a coma, “When I woke up, I was expecting Christmas,” says Norma. Instead, a different kind of gift.
Eight weeks after giving birth, Emma stopped breathing. She was rushed to the Regional and came to the coronary intensive care unit requiring a complex electrophysiological (EP) diagnosis.
Emma is one of a few to be fitted at the New Brunswick Heart Centre with an advanced technology – a subcutaneous ICD or S-ICD, a very specialized pacemaker. She is also a nurse in cardiac rehabilitation.
“It is a personal and professional passion for me, I will be forever grateful that we have the innovative care here that has helped me and so many others. We are very fortunate.”
Dr. McGrath began his training in New Brunswick and continued it in Edmonton where he learned a new procedure to plug a leaky heart.
“We now have the ability to actually go in through a vein in the leg and up to the heart and plug the hole that way. That means the patient goes home later that day. They've got a tiny scar on their leg from a small puncture and beyond that, they're back to doing what they were doing before.”