Man in his 60s diagnosed with rare heart defect, usually seen in childhood: ‘Lucky to have lived this long’

Mechanic Carlos Perez was feeling good as he finished work at his auto repair shop in June 2025. He sat down with a glass of water, planning to relax for a few minutes before heading home.

Then, out of nowhere, his heart started pounding and his chest hurt. When he tried to stand up, “the world shrank,” Perez said.

“I said, ‘Oh, no way,’” Perez, 72, said. “It was coming in waves.”

Perez called his daughter-in-law, a doctor, and she recommended he go to the emergency room. His wife took him to the hospital. There, doctors determined that he was suffering atrial fibrillation, or AFibwhen the heart beats irregularly. This common illness can be dangerous: if left untreated, it can lead to stroke or heart failure.

Perez’s heart rate stabilized after about 90 minutes. But no one could understand why this irregularity had occurred. A battery of tests found no obvious cause. Then, an advanced scan looked at both sides of his heart.

“A doctor came in, then two doctors, then a whole group of doctors came into the room,” Perez said. “I’m really starting to worry. And they said, ‘No, no, don’t worry. It’s just we’ve all heard about this, but we’ve never seen a patient with this.'”

An incredibly rare heart defect

Perez suffered from a rare congenital heart condition called cor triatriatum, where a membrane grows in one of the upper atria of the heart and divides it in two, leaving the heart with five chambers instead of the typical four. Without treatment, cor triatriatum can cause pulmonary hypertension, or high blood pressure in the arteries that carry blood from the heart to the lungs. This can eventually cause irregular heart rhythms, which can be life-threatening.

The condition is rare: About 0.8 percent of babies are born with congenital heart disease, said Dr. Wayne Franklin, a cardiologist and senior vice president of the Heart and Lung Center at Children’s Nationwide. Corn triatriatum accounts for 0.1% of these cases, or approximately 1 in 10,000.

Perez’s case was even rarer. Corn triatriatum is almost always diagnosed in utero or during infancy and treated early in a person’s life. If not, it’s usually discovered when a person is between 30 and 40 years old, Franklin said.

But Perez had gone through decades without major problems.

“Most patients with this disease don’t survive that long,” said Dr. Tom Nguyen, medical director of Baptist Health Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute. “Carlos was very lucky to have lived this long before he started having triggers that something was wrong.”

What saved Perez, Nguyen said, was the presence of a small gap in the membrane. This allowed blood to flow normally through his heart. But it had shrunk with age, until the organ was stressed enough that it began to exhibit atrial fibrillation.

“If he didn’t have that, he definitely wouldn’t be here today,” Nguyen said.

Dealing with the unknown

Detecting this disease was only the first step. Now doctors had to treat him. First, Perez’s cardiologist tried medication. But in September, Perez had another episode and returned to the emergency room. Doctors had to get his heart back to its normal rhythm. It became clear that he would need surgery.

Now Nguyen and heart surgeon Dr. Makoto Hashimoto had to operate on a heart unlike anything they had ever seen. Nothing comparable to the membrane exists in the adult heart. Hashimoto said he did not know which materials could be safely removed and which could remain.

For help, Nguyen and Hashimoto turned to Dr. David Kalfa, chief of cardiovascular surgery and co-director of the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Heart Institute. The three doctors are all professors and researchers at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University. Kalfa, who had treated corn triatriatum in pediatric patients, was able to provide advice on how to remove the membrane.

Then the trio went even further. In infants, cor triatriatum is usually treated with open heart surgery. But Hashimoto, director of robotic cardiac surgery at FIU, and Nguyen, director of minimally invasive surgery at Baptist Health Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute, wanted to try a less invasive robotic operation.

“When they said they were going to have to cut out a piece of my heart, I imagine, you know, the whole procedure,” Perez said, imitating opening his chest. “When they said, ‘No, we don’t need to do that, we think we can do it,’ I felt like I was in good hands.”

A surgery “like science fiction”

Perez had surgery on January 7, 2026. With Kalfa’s guidance, Nguyen and Hashimoto were able to remove the membrane robotically. Robotic surgery allows doctors to enlarge the surgical field up to 10 times, Nguyen said, making it even easier to identify what needs to be removed and what might be left behind.

Perez only had a few small incisions. He said the procedure was “like science fiction”. He was released from the hospital after less than a week. Today, he only has a few small scars and has returned to an active life.

“He did a fantastic job,” Nguyen said. “It’s kind of a Cinderella story, where he’s in the right place at the right time for this disease to be cured.”

Perez will have to watch out for signs of atrial fibrillation for the rest of his life, but it can now be managed with monitoring and medication. His corn triatriatum can be considered cured, Kalfa said.

A lasting partnership

The collaboration between Kalfa, Nguyen and Hashimoto did not end with Perez’s recovery.

The three doctors worked together again to conduct robotic heart surgery at the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Heart Institute in August. It was the first surgery of its kind in Florida, Kalfa said. The procedure treated a congenital heart defect in a teenager, a hospital spokesperson said. The teenager was able to return home a day after the operation.

The hospital also developed a pediatric robotic cardiac program, Kalfa said. It is only the second program of its type in the United States

“That pediatric knowledge helped an adult patient and then comes back to the pediatric population to help other children by providing this robotic approach that was originally designed for the adult population,” Kalfa said. “It’s quite beautiful.”