Photo by Patrick Dove
Patrick Dove/Standard-Times Doctors Tom DeMeester (left) and Pat Gibson spend a moment talking to patient Renee Spieker before her surgery to implant a new device, called the Linx, which will help Spieker’s severe gastroesophageal reflux disease. Gibson, a surgeon at San Angelo Community Medical Center, is one of six doctors in Texas trained to implant the Linx system.
Photo by Patrick Dove
Patrick Dove/Standard-Times Made of magnets and titanium, the Linx system is designed to help people with gastroesophageal reflux disease. In Texas only six doctors are qualified to implant the system. Dr. Pat Gibson, a surgeon with Community Medical Center, is one of those doctors and recently performed the first three operations in San Angelo.
SAN ANGELO, Texas — Coffee was never an option to energize Renee Spieker through her daily routine, a schedule more suited to a workhorse than a human.
The full-time nurse, mother and wife is constantly on the move, but she never resorted to coffee for a pick-me-up because she doesn’t like the taste of it. Instead, the 38-year-old San Angelo woman relied on Diet Dr Pepper to put an extra hop in her step and at the same time appease her sweet tooth. But she was paying a price in pain for the habit.
Spieker suffered from gastroesophageal reflux disease — GERD. She constantly felt a burning sensation from her stomach to her throat because of acid leaking up from her stomach into her esophagus from the moment she woke up. The Diet Dr Pepper would only compound the pain.
After tolerating it for about eight years and masking the pain temporarily with over-the-counter antacid medications, she got an opportunity too sweet to refuse.
The Heartburn Treatment Center at San Angelo Community Medical Center held a laparoscopic surgical solution for GERD sufferers, a small bracelet-like device called Linx, which is comprised of rare earth magnets encased in titanium that wraps around the sphincter that seals off the stomach from the lower esophagus.
“In this field, this is the first major development in the surgery of the sphincter in the past 50 years,” said Tom DeMeester, a world renowned esophageal surgeon and pioneer in the field. DeMeester traveled with the Linx manufacturer to act as a proctor for surgeons who were performing the procedure for the first time.
The Linx bracelet retracts one bead at a time to allow food to pass through but will not allow acid to regurgitate upward from the stomach. Following an implant, the patient usually recovers at a much quicker rate than more invasive methods of treating GERD.
Linx manufacturer Torax hand selected six experienced esophageal surgeons in Texas to introduce the bracelet procedure, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year. On Tuesday, DeMeester and Torax made a pit stop in San Angelo to debut the procedure with Dr. Patrick Gibson and three of his patients.
One of them was Spieker.
The Linx implant serves as a successor to Nissen fundoplication surgery, a process in which the surgeons wraps the upper part of the stomach to the lower end of the esophagus through laparoscopic means. The drawback to that surgery, DeMeester said, is that it is most times performed as a last resort and if heartburn persists, the only other solution is medication.
“I’ve actually done somewhere like 234 of (Lap Nissens) in the last five years. They’re actually a more technical procedure than the Linx one,” Gibson said. “These (Linx) procedures go a lot faster. The advantage will be to the patient and that they can go home and eat a soft diet instead of a Lap Nissen diet, where they are severely restricted for two to three weeks.”
For Spieker, it was a quick and fairly painless procedure with immediate results. Her surgery lasted for approximately an hour.
“There’s little pain where the top incision was made. As far as pain: I’ve had gall bladder, back surgery, a hysterectomy and C-section — this was nothing compared to all that stuff,” she said, recovering in her hospital bed the morning after surgery, just before being discharged.
“In the morning, usually when I wake up I would feel the regurge and the heartburn would be like your esophagus is on fire. I’ve been drinking my Diet Dr Peppers since this morning, and been feeling good. I do belch now and I ate regular food last night and today. I’m feeling pretty good right now,” she said.
The procedure also got a positive review from San Angelo couple D.Y. and Shirley Cole, who both had the surgery done recently at Scott & White Center for Heartburn and Acid Reflux in Round Rock. D.Y. Cole was one of the first patients in Texas to get the procedure, and DeMeester and Torax were present for that procedure, too, with Dr. Tripp Buckley performing the surgery.
D.Y. Cole, 73 and an avid singer, would experience intolerable pain in his throat when he would try to keep a tune going. He and his wife dealt with the pain for years, but the expensive medication they took to control it became less effective as time went by, and the side effects associated with the medicine had the couple scared for their health later in life.
Much like Spieker, Cole got tired of dealing with the medication and constant burning. He looked into fixes on the Internet and came across Linx. At the time, in March, Gibson wasn’t trained in how to do the procedure but Buckley was in the process. By luck he called the Round Rock facility and was told if he could come in the next day. After consultations he was in surgery 10 days later.
“You know when it bothered me the most? Christmas carols,” D.Y. Cole said. “I got to the point where I wouldn’t go to the choir (at church). We would go to church and all I would be able to sing was the first few verses, then I was done. I’m on the way back now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sing with the (Twin Mountain) Tonesmen again, but at least I can sing in church.”
Buckley recently performed the same surgery on Shirley Cole, who was experiencing pain in the night that kept her from sleeping. She wanted to see how her husband reacted to the surgery before she went through with it, Buckley said. A couple of weeks following her surgery, she is pain-free and highly recommends the cure.
Before the surgeries, the Coles were restricted from eating spicy or acidic foods. Their foods were bland and nothing to look forward to, D.Y. Cole said. Not too long after the surgery, D.Y. Cole has been able to enjoy his citrus fruits and spicy foods once again.
“The surgery was a godsend,” he said. “I’m 73 years old and I’d say I still have 20 to 30 more years to live, I shouldn’t have to deal with those problems.”
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