Heart problems not the barrier they once were
Sarah Bare’s heart is racing, and it’s not because she’s nervous about her first pregnancy.
The 27-year-old suffers from tachycardia — an inefficient, rapid heartbeat that reduces blood flow to the body — which came on unexpectedly in 2009 during a breathless episode at work.
Luckily, the Squamish resident — herself a trained cardiac care nurse — was working in an Edmonton hospital at the time. She knew enough to go to the emergency department, and they found her heart racing at up to 180 beats per minute. For an adult, 100 is the upper threshold for normal.
Her condition was controlled with medication, but Bare worried it would bar her from having a family.
“My doctor always said there might be an issue getting pregnant,” she says, sitting in an exam room in St. Paul’s cardiac obstetric clinic with her husband, Bryan, by her side.
So she was referred here, and her baby, now growing well and 21 weeks along, is being carefully monitored.
With this clinic, cardiologists Dr. Marla Kiess and Dr. Jasmine Grewal are helping mothers with heart conditions who would once be warned against pregnancy to fill their hearts with joy.
“It’s kind of a unique area,” says clinic director Dr. Kiess.
These days, women with heart disease, women who have had heart attacks or congenital heart malformations or even past transplant recipients can give birth safely with the right kind of care — something unheard of a generation ago, when such pregnancies could be fatal.
“I think that we’ve reduced the mortality rate since we started the clinic,” Dr. Kiess says proudly. “We’ve definitely seen a significant reduction in the number of complications.”
The cases they see are remarkably complex. Some women have pulmonary hypertension, a condition with a mortality rate of up to 50 per cent. Others will need valve replacement surgery before pregnancy.
In rare cases, they have even performed heart surgery on women who are pregnant, although the hospital stresses that this happens only in extreme cases where circumstances absolutely necessitate it.
The clinic runs three times a month and has been growing quickly — they have seen some 400 patients from across B.C. over the years — but it runs on a shoestring.
With more funding they’d like to expand to help more women like Bare, who, with luck and with extra care from St. Paul’s, will get the gift of a healthy baby boy this December.