Thank you, Dr. James Tweddell

2026-05-15.

As I wait through my current disability, I went through my list of providers. Dr. James Tweddell was still there. He performed my Fontan procedure while I was an infant, 25+ years ago. He died of cancer in 2022, at age 62.

I was born with tricuspid atresia, a heart defect that affects 1 in 10,000 babies. There is no cure, only palliative treatment known as the Fontan procedure, a pair of open-heart surgeries to significantly redirect blood flow around the heart. Most people have four chambers in their heart: two ventricles and two atria. I only have one of each.

Babies like me are supposed to be cyanotic when born: literally with bluish skin due to a lack of oxygen in their blood. I was red and angry, to everyone’s delight. As I grew up, my mom would rant and rave about how healthy I was. In her words, I was the fastest in history to recover from my procedure! (I don’t have the heart to fact-check that!) I was able to run a mile in 8:32 in middle school, holding my own with my classmates. I played basketball and volleyball, and I even ran track and field for a season. I did OK. I definitely preferred basketball: I was one of the taller kids, and I remember my elementary school team losing their first game when I stayed home sick.

When Dr. Tweddell performed my surgeries, they were being done in a very new way. The oldest people to get a Fontan procedure as an infant are less than ten years older than me. Between my first and second surgery, new research had come out and Dr. Tweddell was, in my mom’s words, adamant that I have an extracardiac shunt.

When I was around 15, I started seriously questioning my cardiologists, some of the leading experts in the world, on how long I’d live. They were honest. They didn’t know. There simply wasn’t enough data. As I reached 18 or 19, though, more info had come in, and I was assured I’d live for decades before significant intervention was needed. My heart remains healthy to this day.*

I had a vibrant and energetic childhood. I’m living an amazing life as an adult. I’m 6’3” when the doctors said I’d be short. My resting heart rate is 55 beats per minute. I rock climbed for over a year before I stopped due to a wrist injury and a gym closure. Before I got sick in March, I spent 45 minutes a day, five days a week, walking up and down a 300-foot hill to stay in shape. It was getting too easy, and I added another 150 feet in February without issue. My heart is healthy, and I have never taken that for granted.

I heard Dr. Tweddell’s name occasionally at my annual checkups as a child, but never met him or saw him in person.

I first saw the headline of his passing a few months ago. I was sad, but didn’t have the energy to read the full article. As it turns out, the man was even more amazing than I thought, and his personal innovations affected the trajectory of my life in ways I’ll never know. This is to say nothing of the thousands of others he’s helped, directly and indirectly.

This is the line that made me cry:

He also helped reduce interstage mortality of single ventricle patients through the development of a home monitoring program.

There is a small family in-joke about me sleeping with my arm raised straight into the air. It’s something I did subconsciously through college, and occasionally do nowadays to relieve stress. It comes from my in-patient post-op monitoring as a baby, but I always thought it was from home monitoring. I know I’m a single-ventricle patient. I read this sentence and immediately imagined a man at his desk, working desperately over a stack of papers, trying his darndest to save the lives of infants, thinking of the Wiemer baby he had just operated on and hoping to save kids like him. Dr. Tweddell worked hard to save my life and the lives of thousands of others. While I’ve since learned that interstage mortality was never a concern for me, the thousands of others remain.

The man was a leader in a life-saving field. What an amazing legacy he’s left. What a tragedy that he died so early.

From the bottom of the heart that I have because of you, thank you, Dr. Tweddell.

In Memoriam: James S. Tweddell, MD, 1959-2022 - Research Horizons by Cincinnati Children’s

2026-05-15: Made some corrections based on feedback from my mom and further research 🤓

See also Blog - markwiemer.com