Brandon Cochran, a 39-year-old real estate agent in Louisville, Kentucky, was at home with his family in October 2020 when he went into cardiac arrest. His implanted defibrillator shocked him back to life, and he was hospitalized for seven months.

In 2018, Ronnie Kreis began to develop severe heart failure. After being hospitalized multiple times that year near his home in Oliver Springs in East Tennessee, he was told that nothing else could be done.

VHVI’s cardiac surgery and heart failure teams recently celebrated a milestone — implanting the 500th adult patient with a ventricular assist device.

This teacher got a life-saving heart transplant. So did her student. What are the odds?

Tim Lowell of Hernando, Mississippi, received the first total artificial heart in the state of Tennessee when the cardiac surgery team at Vanderbilt Health placed the device in his chest on Sept. 26, 2018. The mechanical heart kept him alive for nearly three months until a matching human donor heart became available and he was transplanted on Dec. 16, 2018, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.