Last month, when Carolynn Taplin retired from Boston Scientific Corp. as a product builder making heart stents, her departure was celebrated quietly with a small party of co-workers, complete with an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen -- her favorite.
That was just fine for the 65-year-old Taplin. She'd already endured enough notoriety in her workplace.
Back on Oct. 23, 2007, Taplin reported to the Maple Grove complex for her 6 a.m. shift, just as on any other workday. That particular day, the Columbia Heights resident was working on a line of 12 colleagues making Taxus stents -- tiny mesh struts loaded onto a long catheter that is inserted into a patient's body through an artery in the groin to prop open clogged arteries.
On that October day, Taplin felt pain pushing on her chest as she walked a short distance to a staff meeting.
"What is happening to me?" she thought. She felt uncomfortable in the meeting, but said nothing when it broke up and got back to work.
Back on the manufacturing line, Taplin had to sit a spell every 15 minutes or so. When she moved, the pain grew worse. She told herself to relax.
"I was in typical denial," she said in an interview, although in the back of her mind she knew that she might be having a heart attack.
She was. She clutched her chest and summoned her supervisor. Her colleagues said later her face had turned a slick kind of white. An ambulance was called, and Taplin was taken to Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park.
When a cardiologist told her she needed a stent, he asked: "Do you want a Boston Scientific stent, or one made by Johnson & Johnson?"
That was a no-brainer. "I know what goes into our stents," Taplin said.
She was treated with a Taxus Express 2 stent in a successful angioplasty procedure, and left the hospital the next day.
But that's not the end of Taplin's story.
Each stent recipient is given a wallet-sized registration card with the name of the product, a registration number and, most importantly to Taplin, its lot number. That way, if a device is recalled by the Food and Drug Administration for a safety problem or a defect, companies can track potential problems directly back to the patient.
In some ways, it's easier to track a recalled device in a person than a problem in a car or, certainly, a food product.
Tracking quality is crucial in the device industry, especially for a product like the Taxus stent, which has turned into a blockbuster device for Massachusetts-based Boston Scientific and its Maple Grove-based cardiovascular division.
"It's extremely important for medical devices and other products to be tracked in case there's a problem," said Arthur Erdman, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota. "But it's very personal when it comes to medical devices."
As she recovered from her heart procedure, Taplin wondered: "Did I make my own stent?"
She called her supervisor and was told the lot that included her stent was made in August of 2007. But the late shift had made the stent, not Taplin's earlier tour. She says she was a little disappointed -- what a great story it would have been for family picnics and get-togethers.
But Taplin later learned something just as satisfying: Her friend Shiong Vang, 26, of Maplewood, was on the team that made her stent.
Vang said earlier this week he felt good making the device that saved his friend's life.
"I worked the day Carolynn had her heart attack, I was shocked. I feel good making a product that saves lives."
Janet Moore • 612-673-7752
