Cardiac surgeon Peter Birnbaum hopes to spark an interest in medicine with hands on experience, letting students poke and prod a real heart. For the past few years he’s brought in his staff from Fresno Heart & Surgical Hospital and several fresh cow hearts to Clovis West High School in Fresno to give anatomy lessons.

Daryle Lamonica, quarterback for the Oakland Raiders during the late 60s and early 70s, knows the value of a great team. And he’s grateful for the top-notch team at Fresno Heart & Surgical Hospital who took care of him when he had quadruple heart bypass surgery in mid-May.

Tim Volk, a 51-year-old ex-Marine and nuclear engineer, was facing the prospect of a risky third open heart surgery after blockages were again found in arteries leading to his heart. But cardiologist Bipin Joshi offered him another choice with a new technology – the “Impella” or world’s smallest heart pump.

It’s been a few months since Carl Booker’s cath lab procedure was filmed by nationally-syndicated reality TV show Healthcare Heroes. Dr. Bipin Joshi performed the catheter procedure in September to help Booker’s congestive heart failure. Now Booker is able to get around better and is doing well.

To learn more about how to live with congestive heart failure, read on:

When it comes to heart attack – minutes count – and the good news for Valley patients is Community Regional Medical Center takes fewer minutes than most when measuring time for emergency cardiac care.

This measurement is called “door-to-balloon,” starting at the time a patient comes into the emergency department and ending when a catheter guide wire crosses the culprit lesion in the cardiac cath lab.

When he got sick, Marty Nunes didn’t expect anything more than the flu. When his wife Kimberly decorated the tree, she didn’t expect to celebrate Christmas in March. Their 7-year-old son Matthew didn’t expect a daily visit to the hospital to be part of his after-school routine. And the entire Nunes family didn’t expect to spend almost three months praying for a miracle – but they did.

Rosalie Wyckoff, 54, is exhilarated to be able to walk more than a mile every day now. Just a year ago she couldn’t even walk half a block without feeling extremely fatigued.

Community Regional Medical Center was the first in the Valley to invest in the Aquadex FlexFlow systems that remove excess fluid from the patient with an advanced form of ultrafiltration called Aquapherisis therapy.