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Profile in Courage: Holly Rose doesn't let a life of pain hold her back

By JENNIFER O'BRIEN, HealthyLife
First published in print: Tuesday, September 8, 2009

By all accounts, Holly Rose of East Greenbush has led a fairly charmed life.

The former high school cheerleader married her high school sweetheart, the captain of the basketball team. She's the proud mother of four grown boys; pictures of their smiling faces line her living room. With blond hair, a toned physique and a face that belies her 50 years, Rose is an aerobics instructor who teaches 12 classes a week, a feat that becomes more impressive after learning she's battled a potentially debilitating condition most of her adult life.
Rose's journey began when she was just 8 years old. While getting out of the pool one summer day, she slammed her knee on the side, and it swelled up. "We went to the doctor and they felt it would just go down in time," she says. "It went down some, but not completely -- but being an active child and busy, I didn't really have much pain from it so I really didn't worry about it." As Rose became a teen, however, the pain increased. At the time she was cheering and teaching traditional tap, jazz and ballet dance classes. Rose went to an orthopedic surgeon who suggested she have exploratory surgery. "After the surgery, they told my parents it was a vascular tumor." The swelling she had experienced was really a growth of blood vessels. Rose had surgery to remove as much of the growth as possible. Because Rose was young and not fully aware of the potential dangers of her condition, she says her life went on; she finished school, got married and had two children.

After the birth of her second son, Andrew, however, Rose noticed that the chronic pain in her knee she had learned to live with was now accompanied by a shortness of breath. Her heart felt as if it were racing all the time. She went to a cardiologist and was alarmed to learn she had an enlarged heart. They also did a bone scan of the knee area, a moment Rose remembers as one of the scariest in her life. "They showed me the X-ray," she says. "I saw my femur; it looked like Swiss cheese." Thinking that she had bone cancer, Rose cried the entire drive home. Because of the heart complications, she was soon hospitalized.

While in the hospital, Rose was scheduled for an exploratory biopsy. A doctor's last minute decision to do an angiogram, though, likely saved her life. The angiogram, an X-ray exam that allows a doctor to see blood vessels and the flow of blood to the heart, revealed that the swollen knee area and shortness of breath were connected. Finally, at 22, Rose was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM).

According to Dr. Gary Siskin, a vascular radiologist at Albany Medical Center, AVM causes arteries and veins to be abnormally connected. "It makes much more blood flow to a particular part of the body, because the arteries are demanding a lot of blood in that part of the body and the veins are much bigger than they should be as well," he says. Siskin says that while AVM is prevalent in the extremities, he has seen them everywhere from the pelvic area to the brain.