Healing Hearts and Saving Lives
The New Brunswick Heart Centre is Provinces’ only tertiary care cardiac centre, it provides close to a million Atlantic Canadians with the treatments they need and the care they deserve. You can give more moments, more life, to thousands of patients across New Brunswick and PEI. Their heart health, and their loved ones, depend on us.
Please Join us in Advancing Cardiac Care
Dr. Pozeg
NB Heart Centre, Cardiovascular Surgeon
For Moncton’s Norma Melason, multiple complications with her pace maker 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 Brusnwick Heart Centre.
“Two valves were completely destroyed,” say Norma. That’s when Dr. Pozeg stepped in. “He reconstructed the valves,” Norma explains. “As an artist would have done.” 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.
Emma Gallant
Grateful Patient
Eight weeks after giving birth, Emma stopped breathing. At 32 years old, she had gone into cardiac arrest. She was rushed to the Regional and came to the coronary intensive care unit requiring a complex electrophysiological (EP) diagnosis. “I don’t remember much of it, for me, I was unconscious, so it was not that traumatic. But for my family, it was terrifying," says Emma.
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. Brent McGrath
NB Heart Centre, Interventional Cardiologist
Dr. McGrath began his training in New Brunswick and specialized in cardiovascular medicine in Edmonton where he learned a new procedure to plug a leaky heart. Fast forward to his return home and he was able to try it.
“The patient had a valve that was functioning well, but he had an area beside the valve that blood was passing through and that was giving him symptoms of heart failure, really making his quality of life quite miserable.”, says Dr. McGrath. “We now have the ability to actually go in through a vein in the leg and up to his heart and plug the hole that way. That means he goes home later that day. He’s got a tiny scar on his leg from a small puncture and beyond that he’s back to doing what he was doing before.”
