Dr. Aimee Armstrong ’89

“My family laughs at me because I say high school was the best four years of my life—It just really really was,” laughs Aimee (Marquis) Armstrong ’89, MD.

“Even the middle school experience was such a wonderful time. Those years that many people feel are awkward and don’t like—I just had an amazing time.”

Which is saying something—since as a pediatric cardiologist at one of the nation’s top hospitals, performing innovative cardiac procedures in utero, Aimee doesn’t exactly lead a boring life. Aimee is the Director of Cardiac Catheterization & Interventional Therapies at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and formed the Congenital Heart Collaborative Fetal Cardiac Intervention Team there. She is triple-boarded in Pediatrics, Pediatric Cardiology, and Adult Congenital Heart Disease. Much of her career has been focused on teaching and mentoring the next generation of interventionalists and working on device development for treating congenital heart disease in patients from fetuses to adults. She is the national principal investigator for a clinical trial of a new stent for newborns and is collaborating with industry and MR physicists to use a low-field MR scanner for cardiac catheterization, which would eliminate radiation from these procedures. She also works with tissue engineers to develop a bioresorbable transcatheter tissue-engineered heart valve for fetuses and infants.

Born a Holland resident, Aimee started at Holland Christian Schools in the 5th grade, after a summer of gymnastics where she became friends with Julie (Koeman) Haan ’89, whose father taught math at the time at HCMS.

“I at least knew Julie when I started 5th grade, and she introduced me to her friends, so I very quickly developed a really wonderful friend group,” Aimee explained. “Those friend groups changed and evolved through middle and high school obviously— but the friends I had were a phenomenal group, very loyal and positive. I attribute a lot of that to their Christian faith and being able to share that with each other, and share their family’s faith with me.”

Aimee jumped into life at HC with both feet: While in middle school, Aimee joined the school plays, playing Louisa in The Sound of Music. She played on the tennis team through high school, Dutch danced, marched in the school band, and enjoyed school academically.

“The teachers were phenomenal at Holland Christian,” she said. “They were all really good, quality people and mentors who truly wanted you to succeed. They pushed you academically, and I felt very well prepared for college.”

She also appreciated the faith background: “Everything at HC is faith-based and Christ-centered, from chapel to class to sports to some of your extracurricular activities, and it really just builds that foundation of your faith that you can draw on later. You need that foundation. And I don’t think I would have had nearly as strong of a foundation if it hadn’t been for Holland Christian.” Aimee had realized from an early age that she wanted to work in medicine, starting already in 6th grade, watching every medical TV show she could, reading all the books on medical topics she could find. She recalls being entranced by the human heart through a book her mom let her buy in elementary school about a girl needing heart surgery. Her desire for a large university with high quality academics eventually led Aimee to the University of Michigan for undergrad, where she studied biology. She attended Northwestern University Medical School, moved to Indianapolis for her residency, and then back to Ann Arbor for cardiology fellowship and interventional cardiology training. She was on faculty there for 11 years.

While at University of Michigan as an undergrad, Aimee started dating her husband Joe, also from Holland; they were introduced by their mothers who were friends. Aimee and Joe had two children together while living in Ann Arbor, and her husband stayed home with the kids while Aimee worked as an interventional cardiologist. In 2015 the family moved to Columbus, Ohio, so Aimee could take on an extraordinary job opportunity as the cath lab director at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

“One of the greats in our field was running the cath lab at Nationwide Children’s Hospital—he was a mentor to me, and he was going to retire in the next couple of years—and wanted me to take over the program,” Aimee explained. “I knew that I would have the opportunity to have him as a mentor for a couple of years before he retired, and then be able to take over the program—which was just a huge honor since he built up such a phenomenal program there.”

So they moved, “And we just loved it,” Aimee added. “It’s a fantastic institution with wonderful leadership. I direct the cath lab there, and it’s allowed me to do a lot of innovative research and procedures. The surgeons there are collaborative and forward thinking, and we do a lot of minimally invasive types of procedures together. It’s been a really great experience.”

The “really great experience” includes a variety of innovative and precise prenatal heart procedures to treat congenital heart diseases, completed typically when the fetus is between 23 and 30 weeks in utero. Aimee and her team of six typically perform the fetal interventions via ultrasound guidance directly through the mother’s abdomen, through the fetal chest wall into the fetal heart, placing stents or ballooning valves.

She makes it sound so simple. But she’s also really passionate about the work that she gets to do: “I like that I can work with all ages of people— so I work with fetuses, but I will also work with 80-year-olds if they were born with heart disease,” she explained. “There’s almost an infinite number of ways that your heart can be formed, so we’re always seeing something new that we haven’t seen before. And I like that my field is so rapidly evolving. There’s always a new technique to learn, since the technology is evolving so quickly. It’s a really fun field to be in!”

“In my field [medicine has] actually gotten better because there’s so many innovative and minimally invasive procedures that have become available. We’re doing so many more procedures now than when I trained 25 years ago,” she continued. “So fortunately I’m still loving the career path I’ve chosen,” she laughed.

In her time off, now that they are empty nesters, Aimee and Joe have joined a local curling team and enjoy road biking. They’re also taking German classes: “Our kids speak it, and we were jealous, so we started learning it!” she said.

Not everything is rosy, however: Almost four years ago Aimee was diagnosed with breast cancer, and has battled it with surgeries and endocrine treatment— fortunately with success.

“I do rely on my faith a lot,” she said, referring not only to her health, but also her career. “I pray before every procedure that God is with all of us on the team and the patient. And I realize that it’s really all in His hands. Sometimes we do have bad outcomes, and that is hard to deal with, but again I have to rely on my faith. And I know that He’s put us here to help patients, and we just need to try the best we can.

“I had to rely on my faith the most when I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” Aimee added. “My faith definitely got me through that, as well as my family.” She paused.

“It’s actually a blessing to go through it, because it certainly, for me, made my relationship with God so much stronger, because I had to rely on Him to get me through all of it. I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, and I didn’t feel like I had control over it. But I knew that He did.”