Having a strong support system is vital when faced with a serious health challenge.
When Nate and Marion Weeks got married 35 years ago, little did they know they’d each undergo heart surgery performed by the same doctor 18 years apart.
“Husband and wife, that’s pretty rare,” said Chief of The Cleveland Clinic’s Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute Dr. Lars Svensson. “I tried to do a bit of a statistical calculation on that and it’s about one in 25,000 chance of both a husband and a wife having surgery.”
Although Svensson admitted that’s not an exact number, he again emphasized the rarity of performing heart surgery on a husband and wife.
Svensson performed his first surgery in 1980. I asked if he'd kept count of the surgeries he'd performed.
"It's difficult to know because I've operated at many centers," he said. "It's probably about 13, 14,000 that I've been involved with."
Nate Weeks' procedure was in 2005, and Marion Week's was in 2023. The pair live in Massachusetts but traveled to Cleveland for their procedures.
Nate Weeks had an aortic root aneurysm that Svensson said was getting larger.
“I had a successful surgery, never felt any symptoms beforehand, recovered quickly because I was young and in shape,” he said.
Svensson said Weeks' surgery was fairly specialized.
“There have been three of us in the country who regularly do this operation,” he said.
Nearly two decades later, Marion Weeks learned she had a birth defect.
“I was 68 at the time and it turned out that my aortic valve was bicuspid instead of tricuspid,” she said. “What was happening is that the valve was getting smaller and smaller, reducing the blood flow and I was losing energy.”
Each of them spent time as a patient and caregiver. The couple is doing well today and remains active.
“It gives you a real, a truly great appreciation of life,” said Weeks. “You know, just an extraordinary thankfulness for being able to have surgeons who can make those changes that allow you to continue.”
They hope their story will give hope to others facing surgery.
“It’s a hard thing to have to deal with, you know, a major surgery like that,” Nate Weeks said. “You can get through it and you can succeed and it’s worth the effort.”
