Heart of a Lion

Over the years, Eric Roselli, MD, has operated numerous times on parents and children who share the same condition. For a cardiac surgeon, it’s not unusual to treat more than one person from the same family. Diseases of the heart and blood vessels often are passed from one generation to the next.

But the Hamuis, from Mexico City, were different. Leon and his son, Johnny, had many things in common, but the same cardiac disease wasn’t one of them.

Leon is a marathon runner. Nearly 20 years ago, he started fainting during training. The workup showed a congenital anomaly: His right coronary artery had formed in the wrong place. He was told that he might need open heart surgery to correct it and that he might have to give up running for good. A doctor in Mexico sent him to Cleveland Clinic for another opinion. It turned out that his fainting wasn’t caused by the misplaced artery; rather, it was the result of an abnormal rhythm in one of the lower chambers of his heart. It was treated with a cardiac ablation — a minimally invasive procedure.

Leon went back to running. Then, in 2024, a routine follow-up revealed an aneurysm in his aorta. Further testing turned up a leaking aortic valve and novel testing from Cleveland Clinic demonstrated that the misplaced coronary artery he’d been born with was now beginning to affect the blood flow to his heart during exercise.

It all needed to be addressed, and by then he’d been referred to Dr. Roselli, chief of adult cardiac surgery and director of the Aorta Center because of his expertise with thoracic aneurysms and adult congenital heart disease. He holds the Stephens Family Endowed Chair in Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Dr. Roselli was able to remove Leon’s aneurysm, repair the aortic valve rather than replace it and move the coronary artery into the position it should have been in all along.

While Leon was well along the road to recovery, his son was heading in the opposite direction. Dr. Roselli would operate on Johnny only a year after he operated on his father.

For Johnny, an unusual run of symptoms — heartburn…dehydration…fainting — ultimately led to a diagnosis of cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. These tumors are very rare, hide in difficult places and are only treated regularly at a few centers in the world. In Johnny’s case, it occupied the majority of the right atrium of his heart, encased a coronary artery and extended to the base of his tricuspid valve.

Before the surgery, Dr. Roselli and his colleague Serge Harb, MD, built a three-dimensional model of Johnny’s heart from his CT scans so the team could plan its approach before a single incision was ever made. During the 10-hour operation, the goal was to leave nothing of the disease behind, which meant removing a large portion of the heart and then rebuilding it. 

To lower the risk of recurrence, Dale Shepard, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute recommended chemotherapy. Johnny was able to have the treatments back home in Mexico, near his family. After four rounds, his latest scans are clear.

Before Dr. Roselli operates on anyone, he tells his team who the patient on the table is. Not the diagnosis. The person. Everyone has a story.

Some of them, like this one, stick with you. As a father himself, Dr. Roselli was moved by watching Leon and Johnny navigate the hardest year of their lives by refusing to go it alone. They had each other’s backs. They came to each other’s appointments. They even made plans to do a marathon together: Leon’s fifth, Johnny’s first.

They have matching chest scars, while Dr. Roselli has something else to remember them by. The Hamui family gifted him a shirt from their running club, Corazón de León (Heart of a Lion). They named Dr. Roselli its honorary president.

He keeps that shirt where he can see it — near the model of Johnny’s heart.