From Riley heart patient to IU Health nurse

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10/17/2024

Barb Gillaspy

A half-century ago, a kindergartner had open-heart surgery at Riley for tetralogy of Fallot. Barb Gillaspy would go on to become a nurse at University and Methodist hospitals for 33 years and counting.

By Maureen Gilmer, IU Health senior writer, mgilmer1@iuhealth.org

Barb Gillaspy might not have memories of her earliest days at Riley Hospital for Children, but the hospital and all of IU Health are a big part of her life.

She was just a baby when doctors diagnosed her with a heart murmur and recommended she be seen at Riley, three hours away from the family’s Jasper, Indiana, home.

Barb Gillaspy

Her heart condition eventually became more serious, and as a kindergartner in 1973, she would go on to have open-heart surgery by renowned cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Harold King at Riley to repair the four heart defects associated with tetralogy of Fallot.

When she reconnected with her kindergarten teacher years later, that teacher told her how she used to carry her up the stairs to her second-floor classroom because the weak 6-year-old was not able to climb the stairs.

Barb Gillaspy

“It’s amazing what you find out years later,” said Gillaspy, who still has the get-well drawings and cards her school classmates sent her a half-century ago.

The weeks she spent in the hospital helped guide her into a healthcare career later in life. Gillaspy has been a nurse within the IU Health system (and its predecessors) for 33 years.

“So many nurses helped me through my surgeries, and I thought I should do the same,” she said. “I thought I wanted to be a pediatric nurse, but it just never happened.”

She remembers going to school while a patient at Riley in 1973 for several weeks, and she remembers the carousel, but not much else.

She would go on to have yearly checkups with Riley cardiologist Dr. Donald Girod but never required additional heart surgery, a fact for which she is most grateful.

“I know there are patients who have a lot of issues afterward, and I am blessed that I have not had those issues.”

Eventually, she transitioned to adult cardiology care within the Downtown Indianapolis hospital system and earned a nursing degree from Indiana State University.

She worked as a travel nurse around the country for a few years, before coming to Indianapolis and starting work at what was then Indiana University Hospital in 1991.

That’s where she would meet her husband-to-be, Dave, who happened to be the son of one of her patients.

Before she and Dave were married, Gillaspy recalls going back to visit Dr. Girod at Riley. She wanted to know if she would be able to have children.

During that visit, she noticed a thank-you note with a picture she had sent the cardiologist years earlier still posted on his bulletin board. The fact that he had kept that note and photo meant a great deal to her.

Even better, he told her that her heart surgery shouldn’t prevent her from having kids.

She took precautions, of course, and had fetal heart echos done early in her pregnancies, but she and her husband went on to have two healthy children, who are now 31 and 30. The couple also has a granddaughter.

Barb Gillaspy

Since 2011, Gillaspy has worked at IU Health Methodist Hospital in the outpatient kidney disease clinic. Early in her time there, the clinic also sometimes saw cardiovascular patients, including those with congenital heart defects like what she had experienced.

“Sometimes we saw patients who needed surgery again on their pulmonary valve, and I got to do pre-op teaching with them as an adult,” she said.

She remembers telling cardiovascular surgeon Dr. John Brown at the time that he couldn’t retire in case she needed a second surgery herself.

Luckily, she said, she has been able to live a full and active life, noting that she and her husband were headed to Eagle Creek Park recently for an 8- to 10-mile hike.

Talking with her mother about that scary time five-plus decades ago, Gillaspy has a renewed understanding of how anxious her parents must have been to watch their little girl go off to open-heart surgery.

But she was in good hands, she said.

“I’m doing great. It was a good repair, and that goes back to Dr. King.”

Photos submitted and by Mike Dickbernd, IU Health visual journalist, mdickbernd@iuhealth.org