Kipp Penovich in a recent bike race
Photo courtesy of Facchino Photography
Fit as a Fiddle, or a Heartbeat Away from Disaster?
At age 41, Kipp Penovich appeared to be the picture of good health. An avid bicyclist, who would ride up to 130 miles in a day, Kipp, along with his girlfriend, Mardi, ran eight miles every Wednesday with a running club. They hiked the likes of Half Dome in Yosemite. Seemingly, he was fit as a fiddle, but when he was lying down, Kipp could feel an odd pulsating lump in his abdomen.
The lump wasn’t painful, and he didn’t notice it pulsating when he was standing, so he didn’t give it much thought. But after a friend had a near-death experience, Kipp decided to get checked out by a doctor.
The pulsating lump was diagnosed as an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), a “ballooning” of a section of the aorta, the body’s main artery that carries oxygen-rich blood from the heart throughout the body. A normal aorta is approximately 2 centimeters in diameter. Kipp’s aneurysm had bulged to 6 cm, a size that often causes pain in the back or abdominal region, sometimes with bloating or nausea and vomiting.
“The strange thing,” says Kipp, “is that I felt fine. No pain. No nausea.”
As Kipp was to learn, that’s not unusual. An abdominal aortic aneurysm is often referred to as a silent killer because many people don’t realize it’s there until too late. If it bursts, the mortality rate from ruptured aortic aneurysms is 50-90%, and survivors frequently suffer serious complications.
Fortunately, after meeting with vascular surgeon Dr. Darren Schneider and his staff at the University of California, San Francisco Kipp’s aneurysm was repaired surgically through a graft replacement.
The primary causes of an aneurysm include high blood pressure, smoking and high blood cholesterol, none of which applied to Kipp. Or so he thought. What Kipp learned from this life-threatening experience is the importance of regularly assessing his vascular health, because vascular disease can happen to anyone, at any age, at any time. It is also tied to genetics.
Vascular disease tends to run in families, making it critical to learn your family’s health history. Two of Kipp’s brothers have high blood pressure and his father died of a heart attack (heart attacks are usually caused by a malfunction of the arteries that feed the heart). Therefore, what Kipp hadn’t realized is that because of his family’s history, he was at high risk of developing a vascular disorder.
“Now that I know my family’s health history,” says Kipp, “I’m making certain to get regular vascular screenings, and I’m encouraging my brothers to do so, too. ” With the aneurysm gone and good health on the horizon, Kipp looked forward to moving on in his life. After his recovery, he and Mardi got married and started a new life together.
