07.01.09 - Atlanta Magazine's List of the City's Most Trusted Doctors

Wednesday, July 01, 2009 - Lifesavers: Dr. Sudhir P. Srivastava

After an Angiogram in January, sixty-one-year-old Jim Davis of Sandy Springs was told he had an 85% blockage of his left coronary artery and 50% blockage of his right. Already dealing with an aggressive form of rheumatoid arthritis as well as type 2 diabetes, Davis now faced yet another ordeal: heart bypass surgery, an open-heart procedure that meant months of recuperation. But surgery wasn't optional.

"My doctor said, 'You need to have bypass surgery. Period,'" says Davis. "He later told my wife it was probably only one or two years that I would've had a [heart] event, and chances are I would not have survived the event."

Davis heard about Dr. Sudhir Srivastava, who had pioneered a minimally invasive coronary artery robotics surgery. "The robot guy" happened to be relocating to Saint Joseph's Hospital. Davis, a senior manager with a background in engineering, researched the procedure and decided to risk waiting five weeks for the doctor to relocate.

"I was totally enthralled with the robot," he says. "It's a 5.9-day average recovery compared to the recovery period of my brother and mother, who had traditional surgery, which meant multiple weeks in the hospital. I thought this has got to be the way I had to go."

Srivastava, who has more experience than anyone in the world with robotics cardiac bypass surgery, did the five-hour procedure in March. Tiny incisions in Davis's torso let him guide instruments in the chest while watching them on a screen at up to ten times magnification. There was no cardiac bypass machine and no splitting of the sternum. Davis was sitting up the next day and discharged a mere two days later.

"In this case, it was absolutely a lifesaving procedure." says Srivastava. "It is the most important artery, and the mortality there is very high."

Davis praises Srivastava: "His skill is immense, not only the artistry of his ability to put these very fine needles through the wall of the heart and the arteries that are so small, [but] his attention to detail and the process. I am unbelievably impressed with his genius, his skills, his humility. This man to be is almost a god. He is fantastic."

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