{"id":19709,"date":"2015-07-16T18:10:46","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T23:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/?p=19709"},"modified":"2026-01-10T10:19:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T15:19:49","slug":"tammy-cris-community-superstars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2015\/07\/16\/tammy-cris-community-superstars\/","title":{"rendered":"Patient Success Week: Tammy Pilcher & Cris Dykeman, Our Community Rockstars!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll admit it. I love our community<\/a>.\u00a0I love seeing patients inspire each other. I love seeing patients educate each other. And, I loooooooooove when patients use the community in ways that I never imagined.<\/p>\n

For example, some\u00a0patients have Spring Break reunions in Florida<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Other patients connect in the hospital<\/a> after meeting in our community.<\/p>\n

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Heck! Sometimes, I simply can’t resist\u00a0the opportunity to meet patients<\/a>\u00a0from our community.<\/p>\n

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So… As “2015 Patient Success Week”<\/a> continues, I wanted to shine a big spotlight on two patients who inspire us with their words and their pictures.<\/p>\n

Those two patients are Tammy Pilcher and Cris Dykeman.<\/p>\n

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First Community Rockstar… Cris Dykeman<\/h2>\n

One patient who has used our community in a special way is Cris Dykeman from Savannah, Georgia. Cris had an aortic valve replacement and aneurysm surgery on October 30, 2014.\u00a0While Cris, like many patients, had some ups-and-downs in the recovery process, her upbeat attitude has always come across in her words\u00a0and in her… pictures.<\/p>\n

Yes, Cris has a great smile. But, Cris did something interesting with her pictures posted at the community.\u00a0Cris\u00a0started sharing\u00a0photos and photo collages to document her recovery in a unique week-by-week, month-by-month way.<\/p>\n

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\"SSS\"<\/p>\n

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I’ll never forget when I saw the picture of Cris getting ready to leave the hospital. \u00a0It was the photo above (and a few other pictures from our community) that got me thinking about forming the ‘Smiling Scar Selfie Team’ which has become such a big hit at our Facebook page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fyi… This was just the beginning for Cris. Every week and then every month, Cris would post a picture\u00a0that made me think, “That’s great!”<\/p>\n

For example, here’s a photo update from Cris at week 2:<\/p>\n

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\"2-weeks\"<\/p>\n

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Then came the photo collages. Yes, photo collages. Here’s an example of Cris celebrating 6 weeks post-op at\u00a0Disney.<\/p>\n

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\"6-weeks\"<\/p>\n

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In April,\u00a0Cris posted another photo collage celebrating 6 months after surgery.<\/p>\n

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\"6<\/p>\n

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I want to thank Cris for taking the time to share her experiences, her photos, her photo collages, her positive outlook and her recovery with our community!!! To see more pictures and photo collages from Cris’ journal, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Next Community Rockstar… Tammy Pilcher<\/h2>\n

It was October,\u00a02014, when I first connected with Tammy Pilcher, a patient from Freeport, Florida. Diagnosed at age 13 with a heart murmur, Tammy\u00a0needed aortic valve replacement due to aortic stenosis. On October 31, 2014, Tammy had a successful procedure thanks to Dr. Kevin Accola at\u00a0AdventHealth<\/a> in Orlando, Florida.<\/p>\n

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Tammy recovered very well. By her 7th week, Tammy posted, “I’m feeling really good still. I haven’t had any pain in a long time, only a little soreness in my chest at times. It’s hard to believe it’s only been 7 weeks since my heart was operated on and I’m able to do so much.” At 3 months, Tammy posted that she was essentially “back to normal”.<\/p>\n

What makes Tammy’s story so incredible is actually what happened after her surgery — in our community. Little by little, I noticed that Tammy Pilcher was an super, double whammy, extraordinary supporter of just about every\u00a0patient\u00a0in our community.<\/p>\n

Every time I jumped into our Patient News Feed<\/a>, there was Tammy.<\/p>\n

In the morning, there was Tammy.<\/p>\n

In the afternoon, there was Tammy.<\/p>\n

Late at night, there was Tammy.<\/p>\n

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\"205084871_644\"<\/p>\n

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Even now.<\/p>\n

I just went to the news feed.<\/p>\n

Yep! You guessed it. There was Tammy posting an encouraging note to Susan Wozniak<\/a> about her 4 week post-op recovery update. Tammy posted, “Congratulations Susan, on a \u00a0great recovery! God Bless!”<\/p>\n

Simply amazing Tammy!<\/p>\n

On behalf of our community, I wanted to thank you for all of your incredible support! To visit Tammy’s journal, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Keep on tickin’ Cris & Tammy!!!
\nAdam<\/p>\n

P.S. Want more updates from the 2015 Patient Success Week? Sign up to my free newsletter!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-patient-stories"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43223,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19709\/revisions\/43223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}