On Top of the World

Leo Lefrançois, left, and his wife, Lynn Puddington, climbed 19,340 feet to the highest point of Mount Kilimanjaro.

On January 29, 2009, Leo Lefrançois and his wife, Lynn Puddington, reached the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – itself no small feat, but perhaps even more impressive considering it wasn’t that long ago Lefrançois was undergoing emergency heart surgery in the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center.

On September 13, 2007, Lefrançois, then 51, collapsed while walking to his office at the UConn Health Center, where he’s a professor in the UConn School of Medicine’s Department of Immunology. After Sara-Jayne Nocera, a transportation aide who happened to be in the area at the time, was able to resuscitate him, he was taken to the Cardiac Catheterization Lab to get stents for three arterial blockages.

Sixteen months and a total of eight stents later, and after weeks of intensive training, Lefrançois and Puddington (who is an associate professor of in the Department of Immunology) were part of a team embarking on the 19,340-foot climb to Uhuru Peak, which sits atop an inactive volcano known as Kibo and is Mount Kilimanjaro’s highest point.

“This was quite a personal accomplishment, especially considering where I was not even a year-and-a-half earlier,” Lefrançois says. “Had it not been for the outstanding performance of Dr. Kanwar Singh and the cardiology team at UConn, I doubt I would have had the peace of mind, or the heart, to train effectively and then climb the mountain".

And, by the way, as part of that training, the couple also climbed the Villarrica volcano in southern Chile, which peaks at more than 9,300 feet.