A runner’s rapid save

Molly Fadden, a 30-year-old financial analyst, was in the kitchen of her Chester Springs townhouse one day in March, chopping carrots for a salad, when she suddenly felt winded, her heart beating fast. Fadden, who was recovering from a minor surgery on her right big toe, chalked up the symptoms—and others she’d had that week—to being anxious or out of shape. She’d had to take a break from her typical exercise regimen for her recovery, but that was expected; the surgery itself was going to help her eventually return to running without pain. She brushed off her husband’s suggestion that they go to the hospital. 

Days later, as she climbed into bed, Fadden’s symptoms took a turn. “When I put my hand back by the pillow, I felt a pull right by my heart,” she said. “All of a sudden, I could feel my heart racing. I was breathing a lot, but not getting good oxygen flow.” This time, when her husband suggested the hospital, Fadden said, “yes,” and agreed to an ambulance. 

Within minutes, doctors at Penn Medicine Chester County Hospital diagnosed Fadden with a pulmonary embolism, a life-threatening blood clot in the lungs. Within two hours, the Penn Medicine Transfer Center dispatched a PennSTAR helicopter team that brought her the 23 miles to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in just 13 minutes. There, she would undergo a clot-removing embolectomy as part of a clinical trial of new catheter technology. 

Fadden’s case is a prime example of how the Transfer Center makes it easy for a patient with a specific medical problem to get rapid care from a team that is an expert in treating that exact condition, said interventional cardiologist Russell Rosenberg, MD, who performed her surgery and is an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “She was the right patient finding herself in front of the right doctor to get the right procedure,” he said.  

Rapid flight  

Pulmonary embolism, the third most common cause of cardiovascular death in Americans, is a medical emergency. By the time Fadden reached Chester County Hospital, her heart was showing significant strain from the blood clot in her lungs, said Sameer Khandhar, MD, chief of the Cardiology Division at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. “Those patients,” he said, “we worry about.” 

Her condition was severe enough that doctors determined they should escalate beyond the more conservative treatment—administering blood-thinning medications—and move straight to embolectomy, a minimally invasive surgery in which blood clots are removed with a vacuum-like catheter device. But embolectomies—complex procedures requiring trained physicians, specialized operating rooms, and advanced imaging equipment—are not performed at Chester County Hospital. Instead, Penn Medicine centralizes its most highly specialized care at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and depends on the Transfer Center to get the most crucial cases there fast. 

Khandhar developed the Pulmonary Embolism Response Team (PERT) at Penn Medicine to partner with community-based hospitals that need access to rapid care for patients like Fadden. Since its founding in 2015, PERT has helped some 1,200 patients get emergency pulmonary embolism treatment, Khandhar said. “The Transfer Center is the quarterback when those referrals come in,” he said. 

Advanced care, advancing medicine 

Once Fadden was set for transfer to Penn Presbyterian for an embolectomy, her case was screened by the Cardiology Division’s research team, which was tasked with determining whether she met the criteria for any of its clinical trials—and if offering her a trial technology might improve her chances of full recovery. There are some 50 clinical trials happening in Penn Medicine’s Cardiology Division at any given time, Khandhar said. 

The division only participates in clinical trials of devices and medicines that its providers believe to be safer, more effective, quicker, or less risky than commercially available treatment options, Rosenberg said. By the time a device or medicine advances to in-hospital human trials, he added, it has already been deeply studied for safety and feasibility. 

Penn Medicine is one of the health systems that has been trialing a new catheter device for embolectomies since 2024. After a brief discussion with her husband and parents, Fadden agreed to the use of the trial device in her procedure.  

Breathing clear 

Rosenberg used the catheter to extract multiple large clots from Fadden’s lung. “We couldn’t have had a better result from her procedure,” he said, noting that not only did she feel better immediately, but she potentially cut her risk of future complications, such as chronic shortness of breath and heart failure, that can happen when a patient with pulmonary embolism doesn’t receive quick treatment. 

Fadden, a former competitive swimmer turned runner, later learned that the likely cause of her pulmonary embolism was a combination of being sedentary during recovery from surgery, and a medication that can increase the risk of blood clots. Two months after her ordeal, Fadden was grateful for the care she received at Penn Medicine. 

“Knowing there was a really good hospital I had access to in my time of need was important,” she said, “and not just a hospital that could do the procedure, but a hospital that was trying to improve the procedure to make it better in the long term.”