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And the beat goes on ...

A St. Joseph's Hospital cardiac surgeon finds one of the loves of her life comes from helping her patients get on with theirs.

By ELISABETH DYER
Published September 29, 2006

TAMPA - You guide the blade of the saw into the breast bone, starting at the top, below the notch where a human neck turns into chest.

Between the breasts, you slice through the one-half-inch thick bone. This takes finesse, not strength: Too much pressure can force the blade to veer sideways.

You pull back the ribs with a retractor, like double doors swinging wide. Move an artery and cut through a protective sac.

There it is: the heart.

That's the day's job: a coronary artery bypass. Can you handle it?

Dr. Leah Teekell-Taylor does it several times a week at St. Joseph's Hospital.

One day last week, she's focused on a bypass surgery, entering a zone where time ceases. A cardiac team buzzes around her with charged energy and efficiency in a room chilled to 55 degrees.

Anesthesiologist Alfredo Orbegoso plays a selection of jazz and R&B on a nearby iPod. As she pulls a stitch through an artery, attaching it to the heart, Teekell-Taylor bops her head and croons along with Beyonce Knowles, I love to love you baby.

The heart is reddish and covered with shiny, yellow fat. It pulsates, squeezes, contracts and wrings itself, sending blood from scalp to toes.

"An elegant muscle," says Teekell-Taylor, 47. "Without which, nothing else is going to work."

That's what captivated her as an intern. Now she can't get enough.

"It's just intoxicating," she says. At day's end, she often finds she's missed lunch and forgotten bathroom breaks.

Teekell-Taylor is St. Joseph's newest cardiothoracic surgeon, and as a woman, a rarity in the field.

"I can only think of one other female cardiac surgeon in Florida," said Dr. Robert Lazzara, St. Joseph's chief cardiac surgeon, who hired Teekell-Taylor from New Jersey in February.

The rigorous balance of pursuing a career in this highly demanding field and raising a family often requires women to make a choice.

But Teekell-Taylor has both. After completing medical school and her first residency, she opted to be a primary care physician. She and her husband, Marc Taylor, now a cardiologist at Tampa General Hospital, had two daughters, and "then I got the wild idea that I would go back and start over."

It required years of all-day training, working through a second residency. At days' end, she would eat, then sleep, while Marc helped the girls with their homework and took them to the orthodontist.

"It was a humongous compromise missing such things," she said. Now her daughters are in college, Kiersten at Yale University and Allyson at Harvard University.

Tampa, she says, is paradise. She doesn't miss driving in snow to work every day on the New Jersey Turnpike. Her weekdays start at 7 a.m. and, if things go well, end by 5 p.m. after a surgery or two. She lives on Harbour Island.

Sometimes, patients' eyes widen when they meet her, she said. Perhaps they expect someone taller; she is 5 feet 3. "Every now and then, someone will go, 'Is there like an old man here who can do my operation? ' "

She laughs and her dangly earrings dance. A green smock and white coat cloak her petite frame. At bedsides, she is personable. In the operating room, technical.

Teekell-Taylor replaces and repairs valves with a minuscule camera and tools. She fixes irregular heartbeats, lung conditions and, as in the recent bypass, routes blood around clogged arteries without stopping the heart or relying on machines to pump blood as most hospitals do.

For five years, St. Joseph's cardiac surgeons have done bypasses - the most common heart procedure - while the heart beats, Lazzara said. Patients recover faster and it's more efficient.

It's an even bigger challenge to work on a moving target, Teekell-Taylor says.

Each morning, as she drives to St. Joseph's, she says a prayer: "Please, God, let me do it right today."

Then before every surgery, she offers a last reassurance to the patient: "It's going to be fine, and you won't feel any pain."

Three to five days later, they go home and get back to living. She moves on to the next heart. Another life in her hands.

Elisabeth Dyer can be reached at edyer@sptimes.com or 813 226-3321.

[Last modified September 28, 2006, 08:00:14]