Hi, my name is Sudhir Vashist. I'm a pediatric cardiologist and pediatric cardiac
electrophysiologist here at the University of Maryland Children's Heart Program.
I started as a general pediatrician, had a short career spanning six years as a
general pediatrician, simply because I love kids. Then I decided on to doing
pediatric cardiology because I felt this was one of the most fascinating sub-
specialities in pediatrics where, and plus it's also very rewarding, you take
care of sick kids and you treat them and and they recover and go home.
When I was doing pediatric cardiology, what I felt was within pediatric
cardiology most challenging was electrophysiology. This is something that
I realize that even the most seasoned cardiologists sometimes would be afraid
of taking care of kids with rhythm abnormalities, and I didn't want to deal
with that fear for rest of my life. I wanted to face, like, you know, I
want to face this challenge and decided on to doing pediatric electrophysiology.
It's one of the most rewarding feelings I must admit. It is intimidating because
sometimes the kind of problems you deal with are very serious and
life-threatening. At the same time, because you can fix these problems, take
care of them, help them live normal lives, it's an incredibly rewarding feeling.
Actually, my being a pediatrician in the past helps me in that as well,
and I thought I was a better pediatrician once I had kids of my
own. So yes, certainly, I try to put myself in my parents of my patients' shoes to
see what I would like to convey to them so that they feel comfortable handing
over their kids' care in my hands. And I think from their perspective and want
them in the decision-making process and empower them so that they feel at home.
pedia-electrophysiology is diagnosing and treating children with heart rhythm
abnormalities. These heart abnormalities could be fast heartbeats, could be slow
heartbeats and or some electrical abnormality of the heart. The diagnosis
part of it could be as simple as performing some non-invasive tests such
as EKG, a Holter monitor or an event monitor. Basically we look at the snapshot of
the rhythm abnormality and look at the those tracings and diagnose a
problem. Sometimes it is more complex or complicated than that. In those
situations we have to perform special diagnostic procedures -- invasive
procedures, same-day procedures -- when they come to the lab. We have catheters in the
heart and stimulate the heart with electricity, see the flow of the
electricity in the heart and try to induce those rhythms and make a
diagnosis. Once we have made a diagnosis, then we make a determination whether we
need to do something about it or not. That could be either getting rid of it
by doing a catheter ablation procedure, and we use typically two forms of energy
to do that. One is really frequency energy or heating the tissue or
sometimes we just freeze the tissue with cryoablation. Sometimes these problems
are not fixable in the lab by ablation. In those situations, we recommend and
perform a pacemaker implantation, which is basically supporting the heart
rhythm issues and also, in some situations, a defibrillator which can
shock you out of the bad rhythm. I can say with great confidence that our
cardiology team here at University of Maryland Children's heart program can provide
comprehensive, state-of-the-art, most advanced cardiac care to all the kids in
the state of Maryland for any kind of cardiac care or help they need. And we do
have a comprehensive division which basically spans all these sub-
specialities of pediatric cardiology that you can
imagine, right from interventional cardiologists to imaging into imaging
cardiologist to electrophysiologist. And we're recently blessed with having an
excellent pediatric cardiac surgeon, so with having all the nuts and bolts in
place, I can assure that we can provide most comprehensive and state of art care
to kids in the state of Maryland.