BARRY WILLIAMS /Special

Lyndsey Piland, a nurse at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's Sibley Heart Center, holds a young patient at the Tomsk Regional Cardiology Center in Siberia.

It was on a humanitarian mission trip to Russia that Lyndsey Piland, then 14, decided she wanted to become a nurse. "I knew I wanted to help people for the rest of my life," she said.

This spring, 11 years later, Piland, BSN, RN, CCRN, a nurse in the cardiac intensive care unit at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, went back to Russia to practice what she knows best: taking care of children after heart surgery. "It was great experience to be back where my dream began," she said.

Piland traveled with Dr. Paul Kirshbom, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Sibley Heart Center, and other medical volunteers from Atlanta and Wisconsin to the Tomsk Regional Cardiology Center in Siberia. The group was sponsored by Heart to Heart — a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, Calif., that develops self-sustaining pediatric cardiac care programs in Russia — and the Russian Gift of Life organization. The purpose was to train a full team of Russian pediatric cardiac specialists in two weeks, so that the services of the Siberian center could be extended to children as well as adults.

"A lot of my preconceived notions about Siberia were completely crushed," Piland said. "It wasn't cold while we were there. The people were not oppressed, but were incredibly full of life and eager to learn. The town had a modern facility with an 8-month-old pediatric intensive care unit.

"It was so much more than I expected to find in the middle of Siberia."

Tomsk is a six-hour flight from Moscow, making it extremely difficult to get local children with heart problems to established pediatric centers in larger cities.

"The adult cardiac hospital in Tomsk was operating well, but heart problems in children are very different from those in adults," Piland said. "It's not a matter of clogged arteries in a normal heart, but often one of structural abnormalities or parts missing in children's organs."

Kirshbom, who also serves as assistant professor of surgery at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, hand-picked a group of specialists from the Sibley Heart Center and Emory School of Medicine teaching staff to make the trip: Dr. Janet Simsic, a pediatric cardiologist; Dr. Elizabeth Wilson, a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist; staff nurse Brenda Jarvis, CICU; Ann Marie McGoldrick, perfusionist; Kim Crews, surgical technician; and Piland.

The doctors screened patients and selected nine babies for surgery.

"The good thing about these kids is that, once the surgery was performed, they should never have to have surgery again," Piland said. "The Russian doctors already knew how to do some of the procedures, but they didn't have a success rate with children. Our team was trying to assess whether it was something they were doing in surgery, in the ICU afterwards, or the lack of medications that was causing the problems."

Kirshbom tweaked some of the surgery procedures and, working through interpreters, the ICU nurses answered numerous questions and provided demonstrations of post-surgical care.

"We had brought a drug that they couldn't get that will be incredibly beneficial for their patients, and they've since found a similar drug that they can get from Germany," Piland said.

All of the surgeries were successful.

"After the very last one, I walked down to the surgeon's office and there was a mom of one of the children, weeping, kissing everyone and saying, 'thank you, thank you' over and over again. It was the sweetest picture," she said. "I never dreamed that in three years as a nurse I would know so much about the heart or see such a precious moment."

In Siberia, Piland said that she was able to place her patients back in their parents' arms within a day after surgery. That's not always the case at home in Atlanta.

"Our babies at the Sibley Heart Center are so very, very sick and often need multiple surgeries," she said. "I'm human and there are days that I still cry, but for every child we lose, 10 walk out the door to go home with their families."

In Russia, there are 50,000 children living with heart defects who are waiting for surgery. Heart to Heart's approach of developing self-sustaining pediatric cardiac care programs around the country is already saving thousands of children each year.

"The organization pays for the trip, except for food and souvenirs, so there is no reason that someone shouldn't go," Piland said. "I'm hoping to make another trip next year."