The astounding 19-year journey to a sea change for heart patients
When she was 9, in 1949, Brunhilde “Brunie” Seffens contracted scarlet fever. In postwar Germany, where she lived, antibiotics were not broadly used. Doctors told her she would probably develop heart problems when she was older.
Seffens grew up to become a computer engineer. She learned computer programming on an IBM mainframe in 1965, and met her husband, Marty, at Xerox, where both worked. She didn’t develop heart problems until 2014, when a doctor told her that the valve on her aorta, the blood vessel that brings blood from the heart to the rest of the body, was built up with calcium and not working properly. The solution? Open-heart surgery. She was terrified.
“Your heart is stopped, and they put you on a lung and heart machine,” Seffens said in an interview. “People go through excruciating pain and suffering and I was mainly very scared I would not survive this.”
But Seffens was about to run into one of the defining features of medical breakthroughs: They happen in slow motion, as clinical trials are conducted and regulators weigh factors like efficacy and safety. There
