Chip Chick
And she says the most memorable thing they did to help calm her was to ask what flavor of anesthesia she wanted.
When she did wake up, she could see her sister in the corner of her hospital room, and she was sobbing.
When she asked her sister why she was in tears, her sister informed her that she had suffered from a heart attack.
She couldn’t believe what her sister was telling her, and she instantly wanted to deny it.
“My heart attack was caused by a blood clot that formed somewhere in my body,” she continued.
“Which I had no idea I had any sort of blood clotting disorder. And I had a congenital heart defect, a hole in my heart. So that blood clot found its way into the whole in my heart, got to my coronary artery, and got lodged in there, which caused my heart attack.”
She remembers, thinking back to the night before, that her heart was thumping so hard at the winter formal. Luckily, the doctors were able to close the hole in her heart with a small mesh piece.
You would hope this is where this story ends, but years later, the side effects of that heart attack caused more health issues for her, and she had to advocate for herself when the doctors told her she was fine.
It was the summer of 2020 when Covid first started, and she felt like her life didn’t feel right to her. Now you might assume it was because of the lockdown and everything that was happening in the world at that time, but it wasn’t.
She went to the cardiologist because her quality of life was getting worse, and she was struggling to breathe from the tiniest bit of exertion. The doctors kind of dismissed her when the EKG came back normal. She knew something was wrong, so she advocated for herself and asked for an echocardiogram to be done. She was twenty at this point.
It took about 6 weeks after that to get the results back, and it was then the doctors told her that she was experiencing severe regurgitation of her mitral valve.
