Heading off aortic dissection
John Ritter was working in a Burbank studio on the set of his TV sitcom.
Aaron Roberts was cooling his heels in a hotel room outside of Chicago after a business meeting.
Exactly four years separated the days when two very different people experienced the same thing: a ruptured aorta.
Roberts survived. Ritter did not.
The experience brought together Roberts, an Irving, Texas, resident who just turned 41, and Amy Yasbeck, Ritter’s widow and a comic actress best known from the ’90s TV show “Wings.”
They are united in a goal to raise awareness about aortic dissection, something that kills thousands each year.
“Some people will die, but no one has to die,” Roberts says.
Aortic dissection, or a tear in the largest artery from the heart, has long been described as a ticking time bomb. Such statements frustrate researchers such as Dr. Dianna Milewicz because they give the mistaken impression that nothing can be done.
“The most distressing and most common misperception is that you can’t pick out a case of the disease before it happens,” says Milewicz, chairwoman of cardiovascular research at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
About 40,000 to 50,000 people die each year from aortic disease, and Milewicz says that a majority of them have aortic dissection, including U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who died in December.
Exact figures are difficult to pinpoint because the condition is often confused with a heart attack.
That’s what doctors initially thought when Ritter went into the hospital on Sept. 11, 2003, complaining of nausea and chest pains. Yasbeck says that he was given blood thinners and an angiogram but died on the operating table.
Devastated, she tried to learn more about the disease and found little online.
“Anytime it would pop up in any little paper anywhere – anywhere – sadly, most of them were obituaries, more than two-thirds of them,” she says.
She contacted Milewicz, who has studied aortic diseases for years, and learned that genetics play a large role.
Ritter’s brother, Tom, had his aorta scanned in 2007 and learned a similar rupture was imminent. After surgery to repair it, he’s now healthy and grateful, Yasbeck says.
She then went back to the obituaries and called family members of victims – hundreds of them. She did it to console, to offer advice and support, but also to urge them to avoid a similar fate.
“Why would I let it sneak up on any other family like it did on us?” says Yasbeck, who eventually started the John Ritter Foundation.
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On Sept. 11, 2007, Roberts felt as though his chest were tearing open. Then he fainted. When he awoke a half-hour later, he called his wife, who called the hotel’s front desk for an ambulance.
“I passed out as they were closing the ambulance door, and I woke up almost a week later in a hospital,” he says.
In his case, he had a heart defect called a bicuspid aortic valve. Instead of a valve with three flaps, Roberts had only two, which made him a prime candidate for a dissection.
After an aorta dissects, the chances of death increase 1 percent each hour. Doctors told Roberts that had he been on the plane home or in a car driving to dinner, he almost surely wouldn’t have survived.
He was fitted with a mechanical aortic valve, which makes a whirring sound that he says can be heard if the room is quiet enough.
After intense physical therapy, he went from having difficulty sitting up to running a half-marathon 18 months later.
Roberts believes that doctors recognized his aortic dissection from news stories commemorating the anniversary of Ritter’s death that day. So he e-mailed Yasbeck to thank her for putting the spotlight on the disease.
“Sometime later, I got this phone call: ‘Hey, Aaron, it’s Amy,’ ” he says. She enlisted his help spreading the word.
Yasbeck says she points survivors to a blog Roberts created to tell his story (robertsaa.wordpress.com).
“Aaron is great because he’s a really good writer, and he’s written his experiences down,” she says. “So sometimes I hook people up with his work online.”