Sadaf S. Ahanchi, MD, discusses her areas of focus, the reasons she chose vascular surgery, why she values building a relationship with her patients, and how carotid stenting has evolved.
My name is Sadie Hachi. I'm one of the vascular surgeons for Sentara vascular specialists. And my practice is mostly focused in Suffolk Virginia. Some of my clinical interests and specialties are treating artery and vein diseases in the body outside of the chest. So I do a lot of peripheral vascular disease or what we call ph d venus disease, like varicose veins and venus insufficiency, and also things like aortic aneurysms and carotid disease. One of the things that's unique, unique to vascular surgery is that we have a very long lasting relationship with patients. So it's not that you come and see us and we do a surgery and we never see you again. And that's one of the things that kind of attracted me to vascular surgery is that there's this longevity of care that we provide vascular patients over a long period of time where we may do surgery on a patient but then follow them up in the long term. So we really establish a relationship with these patients that I think is important over the long term. And that kind of was what attracted me to vascular surgery in the first place. And one of the things that I think is most important about specialty is not only to be able to diagnose these diseases, but also keep track of them and and and upkeep patients over time. So I've been in the area for almost a decade. Um I did all my training in Illinois, but then moved to Norfolk to do my vascular surgery fellowship and then they asked me to stay on his faculty and I've been here ever since I practiced in Norfolk for the first half of my career. And then I've been out here in Suffolk for the second half and very much enjoy the Suffolk patients that we take care of here. I think one thing I'd like to just mention or talk about is I think one of the positives of central vascular specialists is the access that we do have to innovative treatments and the number of partners that we have in the area. It allows you to consult other colleagues, bring in resources that you may not have otherwise and also trial and test lots of innovative new therapies. Um We always are kind of at the cutting edge of vascular surgery in the area. And it's been that way for decades. Um and it's exciting to be part of a group that's like that. We do what's called trans carotid stenting. So the way we used to do carotid stenting in high risk patients that couldn't undergo open surgery is we used to come from the groin and float wires and catheters and try to place a stent from that um location, entry location. Nowadays we do something called priority stenting where we make a small incision at the base of the neck and through that incision we use a device that reverses the flow, minimizing the risk of stroke during the stent and placed it that way and place stents that way. And it's a remarkable um device to use almost no risk of stroke during it. Patients go home the next day with just a small incision in their neck and, you know, when you finish the case, you Open the device that does the flow reversal to see if there's any debris in there and that debris would have theoretically gone to the brain. And it's still remarkable to me to see the amount of debris you capture, um, during that procedure that saved 10 years ago, we weren't doing when we were doing them from the groin. So that's a pretty remarkable procedure that we do here.
