Right Place, Right Time
Rita Wood’s Life-Saving Surgery at Baxter Health
When it comes to a pioneer spirit, Rita Wood is the real deal. The 81-year-old lives between the tiny communities of Glenco and Agnes, a spot she’s tended and called home for the past 45 years. During her working life, she worked at a shirt factory in nearby Salem for more than two decades and then served about as long as a court reporter for Judge Harold Erwin. When he retired a few years back, so did she. She came home, took care of her garden and watched the world go by.
Living such a life of self-reliance and fortitude has its privileges, apparently; until very recently, she’s never had any major health problems and never spent a night in the hospital. Talking to her over the phone, one wouldn’t even guess Wood’s an octogenarian. Told this, she chuckles.
“Well, I might have sounded a little bit older a few months ago,” she said.
It was then, in April 2024, that Rita Wood finally came up against something she couldn’t tough out or bend to her considerable spirit. Having felt some pain for a while, she’d just gone about her business as the discomfort came and went. That is until the day it came with a vengeance and wouldn’t let go.
“It was a bolt from the blue,” she said. “At the time, I thought maybe it was a kidney stone because the pain was in the back and the side. I was thinking eventually it will pass or whatever, and I tried ignoring it.”
Finally, when the pain got to “probably about a 15” on a scale of 1 to 10, Wood called for help.
“I don’t like to go to the doctor often,” she said matter-of-factly, “but I was almost rolling in pain. I mean, I couldn’t get comfortable. I knew there was something really bad, really going wrong. Finally, it let up enough that I could call my daughter and have her come pick me up and take me over to the emergency room in Salem.”
A CT scan in Salem revealed an abdominal aortic aneurysm, something beyond the staff’s capacity to treat. Wood was whisked to a waiting ambulance to make, in her words, “a very quick trip from Salem up to Baxter Health at Mountain Home.
“I remember pulling up to the hospital, and I can remember feeling them pulling me out,” she said. “And after that, I don’t really recall anything until I came into recovery and woke up.”
Dr. Heath Broussard, vascular surgeon, answered the phone around midnight. In the every-other-week rotation in the emergency department it was his week off, but the tone of the attending physician, fellow vascular surgeon Kent Nachtigal, told him something serious had just arrived at the hospital.
“It was a complicated aneurysm that typically would not be able to be repaired in Mountain Home,” he said. “Usually, they would have to be shipped off somewhere like St. Louis or Little Rock, but Dr. Nachtigal asked me to come in and take a look at it and see if there was anything we could do here. He didn’t think she would survive if we had to ship her that far away.”
Reporting to the hospital, Broussard concurred with Dr. Nachtigal’s assessment that the woman, Rita Wood, wouldn’t make it to the OR in any of the urban hospitals. To further complicate matters, Wood wasn’t a good candidate for open surgery, given her age, and would likely die on the operating table during such a procedure.
Broussard had one trick left in his bag, a relatively new procedure known as endovascular repair of the aortic aneurysm with laser fenestration of the visceral vessels. At the time, he was the only physician at Baxter Health trained in the procedure.
“Basically, it’s a way of putting a stent inside the aorta through a little needle hole in the groin,” he said. “With traditional repairs, a stent is put below all of the blood vessels that go to the intestines and the kidneys. The stents are not designed to go above there because they block arteries, but she didn’t have enough room below those blood vessels for the stent to seal itself in there to seal the leakage.
“The procedure I did put the stent all the way up and covered all of those blood vessels, and then I used a laser to burn a hole in the fabric of the graft to restore blood flow — one artery to each kidney, one artery to the small intestine and colon and one artery to the stomach and the liver.”
The procedure, which took two hours to complete, worked like a charm. Wood was only confined to the hospital for a couple of days.
“It was just an amazing experience,” she said. “I kind of felt like a celebrity while I was up there. They couldn’t have been kinder or better to me.”
A little more than a month later, Wood was back tending her garden with a new appreciation for the wonders of modern medicine and the compassionate care she received at Baxter Health. Her close brush with mortality hasn’t been lost on her.
“If they’d have cut me open, I might’ve just completely, you know, lost it,” she said. “If Dr. Broussard wasn’t there or he wasn’t familiar with the procedure that they did, they would’ve had to send me on. And had they sent me on, I don’t think I would be here today.”
For his part, Broussard said he was just doing his job, although he admitted that such an encounter represents the pinnacle of any physician’s career.
“Saving a life is, obviously, the greatest job satisfaction that I can get — to see that person in the clinic two weeks later and for them to stand up and thank me and give me a hug,” he said. “I guess she was just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and everything lined up right. It all worked out well.”
