Patient Praises CVPH Interventional Radiologist After Close Call

When Robert Noble arrived at CVPH in August, he was already in a fight for his life, undergoing chemotherapy to battle cancer. But at this particular moment in time, there was a pressing issue that, as it turned out, had nothing to do with the cancer.

Initially, the concern was COVID-19. The 70-year-old, who had been stationed at the Plattsburgh Air Force Base many years ago, came to the hospital with a fever approaching 102 degrees Fahrenheit, feeling totally run down and experiencing shortness of breath.

Coronavirus was quickly ruled out after a negative test and a CT chest scan revealed no pneumonia. However, additional scans uncovered something else very dangerous in Noble’s abdomen: three aneurysms.

“We were all shocked when the doctor told me what I had,” the U.S. Air Force veteran from Morrisonville, NY admitted. “The doctor told me if any one of those were to burst, I would be dead in a couple of minutes.”

An aneurysm means you have a bulge in the wall of an artery. It’s caused by the pressure of blood passing through weakening part of the artery, leading it to balloon outward. While they can happen in any blood vessel, aneurysms usually form in the belly or chest portions of the main blood vessel that carries blood from your heart or in arteries that nourish your brain. Aneurysms can cause strokes and blood clots that can become life-threatening.

In this case, Noble had developed three of them. CVPH Vascular and Interventional Radiologist Bo Liu, MD, RPVI was quick to explain what that meant for Noble and why action needed to be taken immediately.

 “Yeah, knowing when you’ve got a time bomb ticking inside of you, it’s scary,” Noble said.

He also talked about how thorough Dr. Liu was in explaining every single detail Noble could possibly want, including the relatively new procedure he would go through that was much less invasive than the previous procedure. With each passing moment, Noble and his wife of 47 years began to feel more and more comfortable about what was going to happen and that he would come out the other side just fine.

“Dr. Liu assured me that it wouldn’t be any big thing and that everything would be fine,” he recalled. “He went over all of the possibilities that could happen, and that scares the hell out of you. With any surgery, you go through that. But, I trusted him completely.”

“He was so thorough about the procedure,” Noble continued. “Right down to telling me the size of each tool he was going to use. He went into great detail, and my wife was really impressed with that.”

It took procedures over the course of two days to complete the necessary repairs. Noble was thankful to survive the close call, and he said he was beyond thrilled with how he felt afterward.

“It was amazing,” he noted. “There were no ill-effects whatsoever from the surgery. I was really surprised. I didn’t have any pain. They gave me a handful of pain pills, and I never took any of them.”

Feeling much better, the 70-year-old was excited to get back to the 26 chickens that he was raising on his acre-and-a-half of land.

“Something to keep me going and keep me occupied,” he said.

Something else that keeps him going: his son and daughter, granddaughter and two great granddaughters. With his aneurysms scare in the past, Noble knows he can always count on CVPH and physicians like Dr. Liu to care for him and his family.

“They were fantastic. And, Dr. Liu was excellent,” Noble said. “I couldn’t’ have been happier compared to any other doctor I’ve had over the years. He kept an eye on me and followed up with me.”

“If I had another procedure to do, I would contact him to see if he could do it.”

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