From farm girl to renowned robotic heart surgeon, meet NGHS's newest member

Apr. 27—As a self-described "country kid" who grew up riding horses, wearing cut-off jean shorts and canning snap peas on her family farm, a career in the highly specialized field of robotic heart surgery might have seemed improbable to those who knew Karen Gersch at the time.

But Gersch, who grew up in Apex, North Carolina, a small town just outside Raleigh, has known since the tender age of 8 or 9 that she would be a surgeon of some kind — and she even remembers the exact moment she made up her mind.

She was lying on the living room floor watching "Knots Landing" or "Dallas" (she can't quite remember) with her mother. Meanwhile, her sister, older by about three years, was staying at Duke University hospital for what seemed like the thousandth time.

"I rolled over to my mom, who was sitting in her chair ... and I said, 'I'm going to be a surgeon,'" Gersch recalled.

Gersch's sister was born with an arteriovenous malformation on her right leg, and after more than 20 surgeries to save her disfigured limb, she finally had to have it amputated at the age of 13.

"I remember going there, meeting the surgeons, and I remember her coming home and having had skin grafts or big surgeries and us having to take care of her," Gersch said. "And then I remember when she did come home after losing her leg and helping her to walk and helping her bathe and take care of her stump. ... That was pretty impactful."

Now, Gersch is a renowned robotic heart and thoracic surgeon who, on Monday, joined Sloane Guy, Clifton Hastings and Kyle Thompson at Northeast Georgia Physicians Group Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery. All four surgeons can perform robotic thoracic surgery, but Gersch and Guy, who she has known for some 20 years, are the only robotic heart surgeons.

Guy performed Northeast Georgia Health System's first robotic heart surgery in February.

"We're excited to welcome Dr. Gersch to the surgical team at NGPG, which is an integral part of Georgia Heart Institute," said Clifton Hastings, medical director of NGPG Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery. "Her skills and experience in performing robotic bypass and thoracic surgeries ensure that we can offer comprehensive heart and thoracic surgical options all in one place, and will prove invaluable to our patients."

Gersch completed her fellowship in robotic heart surgery at East Carolina University under the tutelage of Randoplh Chitwood, who she described as "the father of robotic heart surgery." In 2000, he became the first surgeon in North America (and the second ever) to perform robot-assisted open-heart surgery.

A tall, athletic-looking woman with tan skin and excited eyes, Gersch talks about the promises of robotic surgery with an almost proselytizing zeal, but in a way that betrays passion and hard-won assuredness more than dogmatism.

Early on, surgeons who preached about the potential upsides of robotic surgery, like her and Chitwood, were met with fairly stubborn resistance, she said.

"In the '90s and 2000s when I was going through all my training, those of us who did robotics, we knew that we had an uphill climb," she said. "The majority of people who were leaders in our society were in their 50s and 60s, and they were not going to adapt to robotic technology."

And being one of the very few women in the field made that climb even more challenging.

"You were twice as prepared as any of the guys, you worked twice as hard, only to be cut down pretty quickly," she said. "I recognize the sacrifices it took to be a female in this."

It's taken quite a long time, she said, to generate the necessary data showing the efficacy of robotic surgery, especially because the field is so small. But the evidence is now overwhelming, she said.

"Over the last 15 years, those of us who are doing robotics have accumulated enough data to say, 'You can't even question whether or not we're inferior,'" she said.

With respect to morbidity and mortality, she said, robotic heart surgery tends to perform about as well as conventional surgery, but because it is minimally invasive, with an incision about as wide as the length of a pen, patients often recover much more quickly, lose less blood and face a lower risk of infection.

"So our job now is to say, 'How can we make this more available to people everywhere?'" she said, adding that the Northeast Georgia Health System is an ideal platform from which to spread that message.

"That's what drew me here, is that this hospital has the same vision," she said of the Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville. "This hospital sees that we need to be at the forefront of the wave of this change."