Dr. Madhura Myla: Calm in the Heart of the Storm

When Dr. Madhura Myla walks into a patient’s room, she sees a person and not just a diagnosis. She sees someone’s parent, child or spouse. She takes a seat, holds their hand and listens. The medical plan comes later — but that human connection always comes first.

As an Owensboro Health interventional and structural cardiologist, Dr. Myla is often called in at life’s most urgent moments — inserting stents, performing complex heart procedures and saving lives. But who she is outside the cath lab is just as important to understanding the impact she makes.

“I grew up in a small town in India,” she says, “smaller than Owensboro.” There was one hospital and a handful of schools. It was a simple life but rich in values like humility, service and resilience. Her father once gave his savings to help a stranger get a kidney transplant, which showed her what selflessness looked like.

Her career path began, not with a dramatic emergency, but with a quiet story told at the kitchen table by her mother, whose dream of becoming a doctor went unfulfilled. “My mom didn’t want to be a doctor for money or pride,” Dr. Myla says. “She wanted to serve people. That stayed with me.”

Today, Dr. Myla brings that same mindset to Owensboro — a community she chose with intention. “I saw a need here,” she says. “I wanted to bring advanced heart procedures to a place where they could truly make a difference.” She’s done just that, building a structural heart program that matches the caliber of much larger institutions but keeps its roots in personal care.

Cardiology is a wide field, but Dr. Myla specializes in procedures that fix the heart. As an interventional cardiologist, she uses small catheters, inserted through blood vessels, to treat heart attacks, open blocked arteries or place stents. There’s no large incision, and recovery is often fast.

Structural cardiology focuses on repairing the heart’s valves and walls without open-heart surgery. That includes advanced procedures like TAVR (replacing the aortic valve), MitraClip (repairing the mitral valve), closing congenital holes in the heart and placing the Watchman device for atrial fibrillation patients to help take them off blood thinners. These treatments used to require long travel to major centers. Now, thanks to Dr. Myla, they’re available right here in Owensboro.

Her field is intense. Interventional cardiology often means middle-of-the-night emergencies and lives on the line. But Dr. Myla doesn’t rattle easily. “The more hemodynamically unstable the patient, the calmer I get,” she says. “When I step into the room, I already know the next ten steps.”

It’s not bravado. It’s focus and discipline — traits that stood out even in training. During her fellowship, she had the opportunity to work with one of the highly skilled structural cardiologists,  who became her mentor. “He told me, ‘I’m going to make you the best female structuralist in the country,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘ I don’t want to be the best female. I want to be the best.’”

Fewer than 4% of structural cardiologists in the U.S. are women. “Too many women are told this field is too intense,” she says, "that they won’t be able to have a family or a balanced life. But it’s not true.”

Her mindset has never been about fitting into a box. It’s about refusing to believe one exists.

Outside of medicine, Dr. Myla paints abstracts and landscapes and practices yoga. She plays virtual reality games, skydives to push her boundaries and is a stats-savvy superfan of the Golden State Warriors. And when she needs to recharge, she turns to brunch, meditation and stand-up comedy. “I don’t need a lot to be happy,” she says. “Just good people and something to laugh about.”

She defines work-life balance on her own terms, sharing that some days might look like 90% work and 10% personal for her, and that’s OK in this stage of life, although it may change in the future. She gets the most she can out of that personal time through connecting with family and friends, like calling her parents every day on her drive to and from the hospital. Her vision of wellness includes creativity, presence and connection — and maybe one day, an art gallery and yoga studio she dreams of opening in retirement.

Dr. Myla may not have grown up here, but Owensboro reminds her of home — in the way neighbors care for each other, in the warmth of the community and in the way people are generally friendly.

She’s not here just to do procedures. She’s here to lead with purpose, push boundaries and hold a hand when it matters most.

Learn more at OwensboroHealth.org/Myla.