Gainesville teen recovers from open-heart surgery

On Dec. 31, as 14-year-old Ryan Poe, a healthy ninth-grader at Gainesville Junior High, practiced with his teammates on the school’s JV basketball team, he and his parents had no way of knowing that, one week later, on Jan. 7, Ryan would be at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, his life – and his heart – in the hands of a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon. 

“He was perfectly fine, and then he wasn’t,” Ryan’s mom, Laurie Poe, a Gainesville High School math teacher, told the Times Monday, two weeks after Ryan’s surgery. “It’s crazy how things can change so fast.”  

Laurie – and many others – believe that what happened in that St. Louis operating room was the result of a flood of prayers from Ozark County and beyond.

A little piece of ‘rope’ flying out from a heart valve

Ryan’s illness began shortly after the afternoon basketball practice on New Year’s Eve. 

“He didn’t feel good that night, and he ran a fever around midnight,” Laurie said. “Then, as New Year’s Day wore on, his fever got worse.”

Laurie and Mark, her husband, took Ryan to the emergency room at Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home, Arkansas. “They said it was probably a stomach bug. They gave him a bag of fluids [intravenously] and sent him home,” she said.

That night, Ryan’s fever spiked at 105.

The next morning, Wednesday, Jan. 2, Laurie took him to the Gainesville Medical Clinic where Dr. Ed Henegar examined him. “Dr. Henegar did a great job with Ryan. He ordered several hours of tests, but they couldn’t find anything. So we went back home. But within an hour, Ryan was talking out of his head. It was really scary,” Laurie said.

She called Dr. Henegar, who said Ryan needed to go by ambulance to Springfield.

After a spinal tap in the ER at Cox South Hospital in Springfield, Ryan was diagnosed with viral meningitis. “And it was also in his brain, encephalitis,” Laurie said. 

Medical personnel told them the illnesses are caused by “a virus that was inside him,” Laurie said. “They said he wasn’t contagious and that 70 percent of people have the virus. Most people have it and nothing ever happens. Then something happens, and it comes out.” 

Ryan’s case of meningitis was “strange,” Laurie said, “because the main thing with meningitis is, you have neck pain. But Ryan had a full range of motion with his neck, even with the encephalitis. He just didn’t have the normal symptoms. We were totally freaked out when we heard what he had, but they gave him anti-viral meds, and by Saturday, he was feeling better and they were going to send us home.”

But Ryan was having some chest pain, so before he was discharged the doctor listened to his heart one more time – and heard a murmur. 

“She probably saved his life,” Laurie said.

She and Mark watched as an ultrasound of Ryan’s heart revealed “this little thing like a piece of rope flying out from the valve of his heart every time it beat,” Laurie said. 

The “little rope” was a strand of staph infection that had attached to his heart valve. 

Medical personnel told the Poes the infection was unrelated to Ryan’s meningitis or encephalitis. “They searched his whole body and never found anything where staph might have entered his bloodstream. But wherever it came from, it went from his blood directly to his heart,” she said. 

The doctor told them that treating the condition was “beyond what she could do in Springfield,” Laurie said. “So they were going to fly him to Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. It wasn’t a helicopter. They sent him by airplane because they wanted to be really careful and not jostle him. Because they said if anything broke off in his heart during the flight or during surgery, it could kill him.”

Mark Poe flew in the ambulance airplane with Ryan while Laurie and their daughter Ashley, 17, hurried to St. Louis by car. Ryan was in the ICU at Children’s Hospital over the weekend. And then, on Monday morning, “They told us at 9 a.m. that he was going to have open-heart surgery at 10,” Laurie said. “We didn’t have a lot of time to process it.” 

Stopping Ryan’s heart – twice

Laurie did manage to ask the doctors a few questions out in the hospital hallway, out of Ryan’s hearing. “I said, ‘What is the mortality rate for this?’ They didn’t give a number, but the surgeon said, ‘I can’t tell you, but I can say we’ve lost people.’ I told him, ‘I need a chair. I need to sit down a minute,’” she recalled. 

The surgeons’ goal was to repair the infected heart valve without having to replace it with a mechanical valve. It was a very complicated procedure. “There was a bone saw. They opened him up and stopped his heart. Then the heart comes out,” Laurie said. 

She, Mark and Ashley waited anxiously throughout the day with Laurie’s sister-in-law, Tina Poe, and Tina’s daughter Micaela, a teacher in Lebanon.  “Technology has changed things when someone is having surgery. They were giving us picture updates on our phones all through the process. We could see the bypass machine. We could see Ryan’s heart. They gave us pictures through the whole thing,” Laurie said. 

They thought the surgery was going smoothly when they got word that the valve had been successfully repaired and Ryan had been taken off the heart-lung bypass machine. “But then, around three o’clock, they said he was going back on bypass,” Laurie said. “Our hearts sank. We had been praying, and so many other people were praying, that Ryan wouldn’t have to have a mechanical valve, but when they put him back on bypass, we thought that’s probably what they would have to do. But we just kept praying. And we heard from so many other people who were praying for Ryan. Even in Ava, Aaron Dalton’s wife told us they had called a special prayer meeting the night before Ryan’s surgery. So many were praying.”

After the surgeon’s first attempt at repairing Ryan’s infected valve, he was taken off the bypass machine and his heart was restarted. But the repaired valve allowed a lot of leakage, Laurie said. “So they stopped his heart and put him on bypass a second time, and reconstructed the valve, and that time they were happy with it.”

After the nearly seven-hour operation, the assistant surgeon told them the chief surgeon, Dr. Aaron Abarbanell, had done an amazing job. “If it had been me, or any other surgeon I know, most doctors would have done a mechanical valve,” the assistant physician said. 

When Abarbanell came to talk to them, Laurie and Mark told the surgeon how thankful they were that he had managed to fix Ryan’s heart without having to use a mechanical valve.

“Something came over me,” he told them. “I just felt driven to give it my best shot.”

Laurie silently thought of all the prayers that had blanketed Ryan – and his surgeon.

“I just smiled,” she said.

Then she asked Abarbanell, “How many of these staph-infected hearts have you done?”

“This is my first,” he answered. 

“Thank goodness he told us that after the surgery!” Laurie said, laughing.

Ryan was discharged from the hospital four days later, on Jan. 11. “It was right in the middle of that huge snowstorm that hit St. Louis,” Laurie said. “We saw people wrecking all over the place.” But Mark, who works for MoDOT out of the Gainesville maintenance shed, “is a really good driver,” she said. The trip took six and a half hours, but they made it to their home south of Gainesville without incident.

‘The prayers got us through it’

Ryan’s still recovering from his medical ordeal and has stayed home since their return from the hospital. He will be medicated through an attached IV 24 hours a day for six weeks. He hasn’t returned to school, but he did manage to attend the GHS homecoming Friday night, IV bag in tow. He wore his basketball uniform and waited quietly in the junior high hallway for his turn to take part in the homecoming tradition, when boys and girls basketball team members walk into the gaily decorated gym together. But when word got out that Ryan was there, both the girls and boys teams poured into the hallway to greet him. 

“Ryan was so pale that day; I was worried, but the doctor said we needed to let him do it,” Laurie said. “We were sitting back there, and I guess someone sent word to the teams. They came running around the corner and circled around him, and you could see the color come back to his face.” 

Heather Morrison, a mom, posted a photo of the group on Facebook and said, “Ryan’s peers sure have lifted him up these last few weeks. I hope they never forget the power of prayer. Laurie Plaster Poe, what a blessing!”

Laurie replied, “The prayers got us through it. Love you guys!”

A few minutes later, when Ryan and Hallee Donley walked into the gym together, a loud cheer went up. “I can’t remember much. I was just trying not to cry,” Laurie said. “But I think I saw people in the bleachers, standing.”

Ryan heads back to St. Louis for a checkup next week and hopes the doctor will say he’ll be able to return to school soon. Until then, he’s doing schoolwork at home – and concentrating on recovering from major surgery as occasional health challenges pop up and the prayer requests go out again.

Meanwhile, Laurie said, “We’re just humbled, knowing we have the support of the town and so many people. We are very thankful for this great community and the prayers and support they have given us.”