Hello friends, Sorry, for I have been MIA and have not been posting new content. I have been busy with life and its drama and have been in and out of the hospital few times, I will be sharing the details of that in future posts. Today I would like to continue from the June 12th 2018 post on SCAD.
In the previous post I left off stating that my obstetrician requested and ECG test for me out of precaution. Thank god for having a wise doctor. The ECG showed that I had experienced a massive heart attack. Here I was one day post delivery through emergency caesarean with a new born baby that is throwing up meconium (baby’s first poop) due to meconium aspiration and blood from the delivery.
minutes after receiving the results the entire hospital’s management team was at my bedside; with complete shock and fear on their faces. The hospital I was in was a low risk delivery hospital and did not have a nursery, it was designed for mother and baby to stay in the same room to increase bonding. But, now i was an anomaly. I needed serious medical help that the hospital was not equipped for and nowhere to place my newborn baby.
The hospital director asked “who is coming to take the baby”? my husband just sat down and started crying. We had none, non of our family members lived near by. We were all alone. I screamed through my pain and yelled at my husband ” calm down, call my sister and tell her to get on the next flight back, I am having a heart attack and we have none to look after the baby”. So, that is what he did; while the hospital called the local emergency hospital and organized an ambulance to pick me up, I needed to go into surgery right away. The hospital agreed to watch the baby for a little while, while we called our friends to organize a baby sitter. The ambulance came to take me away I watched my husband hold our newborn baby in his arms as tears rolled down his face; it was one of the saddest moments in our life. I cried for my self and our new born baby. What a traumatic entry into the world.
I was in a daze as I was taken away by the ambulance. My husband followed behind me. I as I got into the emergency hospital I was greeted by my husband his friend who drove him and my close friend/business partner I watched their eyes filled with tears as I was rushed off to surgery to have a stent put in, to try and repair the damage that was done by the massive heart attack.
Hours after having been implanted with a coronary stent I experienced the original pain all over again, another ECG test was done which showed another massive heart attack. The stent was causing more damage than good. due to the limited medical knowledge to what was happening to me, my medical team treated my heart attack with routine processes. But because I was experience another heart attack shortly after the first one, my medical rushed around looking medical research to explain this phenomenon. One of my doctors found some research about SCAD, the medical research found showed that SCAD was best treated by medicine and pain management. The implantation of the stent had caused further tearing and peeling in my heart vessels, something that was dangerous and possibly uncontrollable.
The hospital did its best to manage my pain with morphine, fentanyl spray and through ivy. I was in constant pain control. But the way fentanyl works is that the longer you use it the higher the dose you will need which makes it very difficult to get off. I was also experiencing difficulty breathing. My newborn baby was picked up from the delivery hospital and was now by my bedside, because of the increasing level of medication I was on I was told that I should not breast feed. This news really devastated me…but will talk about it in a future post.
In a matter of days I was increasingly getting worse by Thursday August 24th 2017 I was on high pressure ventilator and heavy pain medication. At this point the head doctors and nurses looking after me came to me and said that my increasing medical needs were now beyond the hospitals capacity and that they would be transferring me to university hospital. Once again I was put on an ambulance and rushed to the university hospital.
At the university hospital i was admitted into the ICU in heart department. The university hospital became my home for the next 10 months.
Below I will attach a picture from my initial admission into university hospital.
By the time I was admitted into the university hospital I could hardly breath nor move. I deeply appreciate all the ICU nurses that took such good care of me. I remember my milk coming in and crying because I was not allowed to breast feed and did not have enough strength to pump, so my kind nurse would borrow medela breast from the children hospital and pump for me; they would also give me sponge bath and encourage me to keep going. The doctors informed that they would treat me through medication and pain management. As much they tried I progressively got worse. Every morning I got an ECG test, x-ray which kept showing signs of more heart attacks. On September 7th 2017 I started throwing up orange foam and it was becoming increasingly difficult to wean me off the pain killers. The following afternoon a new group of doctors came to me. The new doctors were from different departments; one was mechanical heart department, heart transplant department and end stage heart failure department.
That Friday afternoon, I received the scariest news of our life. The doctors informed me that they have done everything they could do for me and that I was at end stage heart failure because my heart function was at 3% right away before all the doctors leave for the weekend or I might not around Sunday night. And the only options they had for me is to be implanted with a mechanical heart device called an LVAD And I had hard decisions to make and should call my family. I cried my heart out while I waited for my husband and family members to come. The option they gave me was to receive an open heart surgery to give my heart a rest for two day to see if some recovery will be regained, if not successful the doctors would proceed mechanical heart implantation.
With the encouragement of family and friends I agreed to go forward with the surgery.