Bringing the Future of Cardiovascular Health to Life®

You saved my life, but you did so much more! By giving their mother back to them, you forever changed the course of my babies’ lives.”

-Theresa, pictured with her family

Meet Theresa. The young professional, wife, and mother of three never imagined she would suffer a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 33.

Theresa recalls wrapping up her workday with a quick treadmill workout at her office gym. The next thing she remembered was waking up — eight days later — in the ICU and learning that her heart stopped and she had subsequently suffered from cardiogenic shock– a life-threatening condition that occurs when the heart cannot pump enough blood to the body’s vital organs.

Theresa, who eats healthy and enjoys an active lifestyle, including running marathons, thought heart issues were “what happened in your later years.” But, with Theresa’s heart operating at just 10%, that was definitely not the case.

Her care team quickly started down a path of increasing mechanical circulatory support, much of which was developed and tested at The Texas Heart Institute. The following Monday, she was awake with her heart once again beating stronger on its own. Today, Theresa is back at work, living a busy, full life with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.

Thankfully, Theresa benefited from THI’s robust research, primarily driven by identifying and developing solutions for unmet clinical needs.

While Theresa’s life-saving hospitalization was relatively brief, the technology that saved her, much of which was created, refined, or tested at The Texas Heart Institute, took an incredible investment of time, talent, and significant financial resources to develop.

While federal and state funding supports a portion of our research at The Texas Heart Institute, it does not support all that we do. We need help from individual donors like you to continue the high-risk, high-reward research to help patients like Theresa.

Please join our efforts by financially supporting our mission to improve cardiovascular health through trailblazing research, thought leadership, education, and patient care.

On behalf of the countless patients like Theresa that we help each day, thank you for considering us in your year-end giving plans. We appreciate your support and look forward to sharing our future — and the future of cardiovascular health — with you.