July 26, 2019, Vol.17, Issue 3

The Saturday after the 4th of July, we were planning to spend with our friends, Wendy and Raymond Mitchell, at the beach in Manzanita, Oregon. But, on July 3rd, I was on Facebook and saw Wendy’s smiling face in a hospital gown. What? She was going into surgery on the 4th? 

I wasn’t so sure what to expect. But, surprise, we all made it to the Oregon Coast three days later on Saturday — all of us, including Wendy, very unexpectedly, with a brand-new pacemaker in her chest.

This is a story, ladies, about the importance of paying attention to symptoms and taking care of yourselves. This is an example of why we need to keep educating women about heart health. It could save your life or the life of someone you love.

A Different Kind of 4th of July Electrical Charge

One of the most ironic aspects of this story is that Wendy is a Women’s Health Counselor and an advocate. That’s how I had first met her when she was Director of Programs and Outreach for the Oregon Health Sciences University National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health (2001-2008), where she planned women’s health events.

“If professionals don’t get it, how do others get it?” Wendy said. “Women’s heart attack symptoms are different than men’s. Men’s are straightforward but ours are more complex. And the problem is that women tend to ignore what doesn’t standout. We write off such symptoms as normal fatigue. Women see themselves as run-down all the time. So what does ‘run-down’ really mean? Early symptoms are easy to dismiss.”

In Wendy’s case, she was tired. Isn’t it quite natural at age 74 to be tired, when you’re working 3 days a week, taking care of grandchildren and running a private therapy and coaching practice? Yes, you might say, it’s normal. She was tired. She and Raymond had also recently returned from almost a month in Spain and Portugal.

She had experienced light-headedness getting up from sitting — a little dizzy but it didn’t happen all the time and didn’t seem all that unusual. She was maybe a little dehydrated. “You need to ask yourself questions,“ she said. ”What could that be?” and ”Why is this happening?”

Then add shortness of breath. And heartburn — of course you think that is because of what you ate the night before. They’re not dramatic — just simple, normal-seeming, and therefore not obvious signs that something is amiss until there are a couple of stronger clues and a tipping point. In Wendy’s case, she noticed water retention — gaining 5 pounds in 2 days. This is when she started to ask herself, “Is there something wrong with me?” 

Then a girlfriend called to tell her that her husband was in the hospital with heart disease, and that was when, for the first time, she said to herself, “Maybe I have a heart problem.” Nobody had suggested that. Now she realizes that should be the #1 question.

On Tuesday, July 2nd, she was leaving the office and found herself struggling to walk one block to the MAX (rapid transit) station due to shortness of breath. She stopped 5 times while trying to walk that one block. But, still dismissing her symptoms, she struggled to keep on going and finally made it to the station. Once there she called her husband, Raymond, to pick her up and drive her home. She agreed to stop at Kaiser Urgent Care the next morning on their way to their vacation cabin at the Coast. 

She checked herself into Urgent Care at 9 a.m. that next morning, and by 9:45 found herself in an ambulance on the way to the cardiac unit at Kaiser Sunnyside Hospital. The Urgent Care doctor had spent 45 minutes listening to her tell her story, all the while taking her pulse, blood pressure (normal), and EKG, and putting all her symptoms together to come to the conclusion that she was, as he put it, “stably unstable,” and indeed, in jeopardy of a heart attack. “There’s an ambulance waiting for you outside right now,” he said.

When she got to Kaiser, she was hooked up to an external cardiac pacemaker and spent the next 8 hours getting checked and re-checked — every possible test was run trying to find out the cause. Once they had ruled out heart disease, they declared it an electrical problem — the neural pathways between the atria and ventricles were blocked causing a delay in pumping action. 

At 8 p.m. the cardiac surgeon came in and told her, “You’re getting a pacemaker at 8:00 tomorrow morning.” On the Fourth of July! Although shocked, dumbfounded, and amazed that she was going into surgery, she knew she was in good hands.

The next day, he inserted a pacemaker in a 90-minute surgical procedure that went smoothly. After a brief stop in recovery she returned to her room and ordered a hamburger for lunch. Two hours later she was discharged, and two days later we met her and walked on the beach — well, slowly and not too far.

Protect Your Precious Heart

Wendy was lucky — she had kept herself healthy. Her heart had been busy compensating for its inadequacy, but it had been able to keep pumping enough oxygen to keep her going.

Now, a few weeks later, she is still blown away. In her words, “It’s such a huge leap from having symptoms to having a heart event, especially for a healthy woman. A week before I didn’t know what a pacemaker was, and now I have one. I wasn’t even in the hospital long enough to get flowers or time off from work!” But Wendy always has time to share her experience (she is already very active in a Facebook Pacemaker Group).

“Keep a medical journal so you can refer back to symptoms,” she advises. “Try to think of yourself as a whole and how your various symptoms might be telling you something. Don’t be afraid to share these with your medical provider or significant other.

“My word from this experience,” Wendy said, “is precious — how important it is to protect our precious hearts. As women, we don’t think of ourselves enough. Instead, we think of taking care of everybody else.”

I know you’ve heard that before, but take it in as if it were the first time. My friend thought it would never happen to her. So did I. You probably do too. But we all live with this Sword of Damocles over our heads, and the world tells us in so many ways that it isn’t so. Then, for one of us or another and always unexpectedly, it is so.

Instead of fireworks on the Fourth of July, Wendy got a different, more personal kind of electrical charge. And I’m so happy I got to spend the 7th of July with her, walking along the surf line on the beach — and will get to spend many more happy times with my friend. I’m writing this in hopes that it will give you a nudge that will enable you to do the same with your friend — or her to do it with you. Please, please pay attention to your body when it’s talking to you.

Until next time, take care of yourself for your well being and those you love.

Yours Truly,

Barbara

 

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