Pediatric General Surgery

When her son Jake was just seven years old, Beth Knutson noticed his chest was concaved. "I thought, ok this is not going to be good down the road if this keeps getting deeper as he gets older," she said. When he started experiencing symptoms at age 13, she decided it was time to meet with pediatric surgeon Dr. Andre Hebra. "Dealing with Dr. Hebra has been amazing. The staff has been great. He just has an air about him that is comforting and puts you at ease," said Beth. Jake was diagnosed with pectus excavatum—a chest wall malformation that affects one in 400 children. "He could tell that he was experiencing some difficulty during exertion sports, running, playing, and so forth, primarily because of the caved-in chest that was pressing on the heart and the lungs," said Dr. Andre Hebra, a pediatric surgeon on the medical staff of Lee Health. The condition worsens as children grow—making Jake a great candidate for a minimally invasive procedure. "The beauty of this procedure is once you remove the deformity and the compression against the heart, the cardiac function, the pulmonary function is 100 percent normal," he said. Dr. Hebra uses a surgical technique called cryoablation to minimize pain during and after the procedure. Giving patients, like Jake, a quicker and easier recovery.