Louisville Magazine

AUG 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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74 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 light, humorous. When Imburgia looks stumped over a mystery surgery a patient tried to describe during the exam, Sue Dillon, the echo tech, pipes in: "Didn't you go to medical school?" "I dropped out early," Imburgia says, smiling. "Back in the '70s and '80s, you just had to show you were interested." Some 50 volunteers make the Have a Heart Clinic possible. And that number continues to rise, so much so that the clinic hopes to add additional days. In 2016, Have a Heart provided more than $40,000 in free outpatient care. In the last five years, it has provided about $250,000 in services. (On Aug. 26, the clinic is holding a fundraiser at Copper & Kings.) e clinic now offers a Patient Advocate program that involves nurses and social workers tracking especially vulnerable patients, checking in with them routinely to ensure they take prescribed medications and that all medical needs are being met. Many Have a Heart volunteers say they're drawn to the clinic's mission, and that they stay because of its leader. "(Imburgia) is the light of the lighthouse," Dillon says, far from ear- shot of her longtime friend and colleague who would undoubtedly cringe at the sentiment. "Everyone wants to make that light work. He never takes credit for anything. But he's the guiding light." A few volunteers started as patients. Detra Gentry began volunteering for Have a Heart this spring. e 47-year-old first encountered Imburgia in 2012 after weeks of weakness and dizziness, her heart periodically sprinting beneath her chest. Imburgia diagnosed her with a mitral valve prolapse, a condition that, in her case, was serious enough that blood was flowing back- ward through the mitral valve with each heartbeat. She needed surgery. At first, Gentry delayed it. Her daugh- ter was in the midst of eighth-grade finals. Plus Gentry was between jobs and, though she was on her husband's insurance, it wouldn't cover the roughly $100,000 sur- gery and recovery. "I was scared," she recalls. "I wasn't going to have it." Imburgia and his staff urged Gentry not to wait, helping to connect her to Baptist Hospital's charity program. She ended up paying about $1,000. Now a medical assistant in an OB/GYN practice, Gentry spent a Saturday in May greeting Have a Heart patients, taking their blood pressure and pulse rate. She occasionally performed an EKG, a test that checks for problems with the heart's electrical activity. During this test on a few patients, she spotted a familiar scar — about five inches, center of the sternum — that match- es her own. Around her neck, just an inch or so above the scar, she wears a necklace with a dangling heart and the date of her surgery — 5/31/2012 — etched Sue Dillon, an echocardiogram tech with Have a Heart, performs an ultrasound on the heart of a young patient with an irregular valve. Photo TK

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