Maggie had suffered from abdominal pain due to her grapefruit-sized uterine fibroid for nearly two decades and was told her only hope was a hysterectomy. Find out how Peter Khamvongsa, M.D., drastically changed Maggie’s life with the minimally invasive Acessa procedure. West Kendall Baptist Hospital is the exclusive provider of this technology.
(Transcript)
[Maggie Pena] I started to have fibroids in my early 30s Of course they were smaller, and at that point there was just one or two. As I got older, the fibroids got larger, and as I got more fibroids, the pain started.
[Peter Khamvongsa, M.D.] I met Maggie the first time during the our COVID pandemic. I was working in the emergency room, and I was going to to see her due to her severe anemia. Maggie complained that she was having syncopal episodes, she was passing out, she was anemic, and she was there to get a transfusion. During the evaluation of her anemia, we found out she had some fibroids, and that's probably a primary cause of her symptoms.
[Pena]I had a lot of pain in my lower back, a lot of cramping, excessive bleeding. I had an accident where I started to bleed heavily and nonstop. That's when I met Dr. Khamvongsa. So he stabilized me, and he did mention the new Acessa procedure, and I researched it, and it turns out that a friend of mine's niece had the same procedure. So I went in again to a follow up. I said, "No, I want the Acessa."
[Khamvongsa] I explained to her that is a minimally outpatient procedure, where we go through the belly button, we put a camera, a second small, half an inch incision where we put an ultrasound, and we're able to visualize every single fibroid that she has in the abdominal cavity. A needle is the one that then is gonna treat each individual fibroid with energy and heat. With that heat, we're destroying that fibroid. Within a period of three month to a year, the patient will see a great significance in the decrease of the volume of the uterus, hence, minimizing the symptoms that brought her into the office in the first place.
[Pena] I woke up, you had a little bit of pain and discomfort, went home, went to bed, and I think that was the first night I had some sleep. I had no more pain. I was less weak, less bleeding. I was very surprised. I was just astonished. I didn't believe it. And he told me, "I'm gonna get your life back to where you were 20, 10 years ago, 15 years ago." And he sure did.
[Khamvongsa]There are older alternatives that a woman can have to treat her symptomatic fibroids, and those can cause people to have back pain, anemia, heavy bleeding, pelvic pressure, incontinence, constipation, multiple things, 'cause fibroids can cause all that, can certainly be improving greatly, with our simple outpatient procedure.
[Pena]So when I speak to other women, colleagues, friends, even relatives, about my situation, when they tell me they have fibroids, I say, "You have options."