Juan and Alicia Sierro Patient and wife

Tammi Garland Patient

For most of his life, Juan Sierra struggled with heart palpitations. The Anaheim construction worker even had surgery in 2005 to patch a congenital hole in his heart. But the irregular rhythms not only persisted, they got progressively worse—both too slow and far too fast, landing him back in the hospital several times. Anti-arrhythmia medications triggered serious side effects.

Tammi Garland also suffered from irregular heartbeats, but hers was a type called paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. Her heart muscle was so weakened by her rapid pulse that it was working at 20 percent capacity. A UC Irvine Healthcare cardiologist told her it was as if she had "90-year-old’s heart in a 44-year-old’s body," Garland recalls.

Thanks to the cardiology team at UC Irvine Medical Center, both Sierra and Garland now have normal heart rhythms and stand a good chance of living many more healthy years.

"I can play golf again," says Sierra, 59, embracing his wife, Alicia.

After meeting with Sierra and reviewing his electrocardiograms, a UC Irvine cardiac arrhythmia specialist diagnosed the problem as atrial fibrillation and atypical atrial flutter, or abnormal rapid heartbeats in the left atrium, possibly from the pulmonary vein that brings oxygen-rich blood back to the heart. To fix the problem, the physician would need to punch a hole through the patch placed during his previous surgery, a procedure done only infrequently.

First, a small catheter was threaded inside Sierra’s chest to study the electrical grid of his heart. Next, the physician pierced two tiny holes in the patch and used a catheter electrode to fire high-frequency radio waves at the parts of the heart muscle that were triggering Sierra’s misfires.

The high-frequency radiowave bursts created a pinpoint ring of scar tissue where Sierra’s pulmonary vein joined the atrium, preventing any misfires from reaching the rest of the heart muscle.

As for the patch, the holes healed up nicely. Sierra is delighted that he is able to be active again. "I always trusted that my doctors would do a good job."

Garland didn’t realize that her chronic fatigue, shortness of breath and palpitations were the result of abnormal heart rhythms. "I had no chest pain," she recalls. "I used to say that my heart beat to a different drum. It turned out to be true."

After many months of taking anti-arrhythmic drugs, Garland tired of the side effects and stopped her medication. Within a year, the Cypress resident was back in the hospital. UC Irvine cardiologist Byron Allen told her that she needed a minimally invasive heart procedure to survive.

"I was shocked, but didn’t want to die before my kids," said Garland of her son, a Marine corporal based at Camp Pendleton, and daughter, who was captain of a her high school’s girls volleyball team at the time.

Garland had two options: Disrupt the electrical connection between the chambers of her upper and lower heart and insert a pacemaker to regulate the lower chamber’s abnormally fast beat; or eliminate the abnormal beats through cardiac catheter ablation.

Garland chose the second path. After puncturing two holes in the partition separating the heart’s right and left upper chambers, cardiologists directed radiofrequency energy at the left atrium, where Garland’s abnormal electrical pulses originated.

Her atrial fibrillation is gone, but the best part is that the pumping function of her heart is now completely normal.

Garland still remembers her cardiologist’s words when he came to her post-operative bedside and heard her heart. "He said I had a pristine heartbeat, pristine! He was totally elated. I’d never seen him smile until that day."

For Sierra and Garland, UC Irvine cardiologists delivered no less than a new lease on life. "If you have a heart condition," Garland says, "UC Irvine is the place to go."