Healing Heart
After two heart attacks, my baby boy brought me back to life…
The first inkling we had that our baby was going to be a boy was when he kicked the heart monitor off my belly moments before I was induced into labour.
‘I guess with legs like that, we’ve got our answer,’ chuckled my husband, Jason, 40, as he held my hand on the maternity ward. After a 17-and-a-half-hour labour, baby Jordan was born weighing 7lbs 2oz. The first few months went by in a flash of nappy changing, burping, feeding and sleepless nights.
A few months later, I woke up to the sound of his crying. As I began to change his nappy, I felt a little nauseous. ‘Jason, can you give me hand, I don’t feel so good,’ I called. ‘I’ve got a terrible headache.’
Jason came and took over, and as I walked back to our room, feeling my way along the wall to steady myself, I suddenly blacked out.
When I came to, Jason was helping me up on the bed.
‘You’re burning up,’ he said, feeling my forehead.
‘Maybe I’m not getting enough sleep,’ I said.
Jason got me a glass of orange juice and later that afternoon, after taking a couple of paracetamols, my temperature came down. The following day, we all went to the GP’S so I could get checked out, but they said it was probably a cold.
‘Just get some rest and you’ll be better in no time,’ they said.
We shrugged our shoulders and went home.
‘You make lunch then,’ I said to Jason with a grin. ‘doctor’s orders.’
I sat on the sofa, bouncing Jordan on my knee. Suddenly, I blacked out again. The next thing I saw was Jason holding Jordan in his arms. ‘You’ve passed out again. The ambulance is on its way. You just need to relax.’
I drifted in and out, shivering, as I was stretched into the ambulance and taken to Stoke Mandeville Hospital. They rushed me straight to the cardiac unit, but almost straight away I was back in the ambulance again on my way to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
When I arrived, the staff were able to stabilise me.
But the surgeon there knew that he would need to take the risk to move me to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where they were better equipped to handle patients in need of a heart donation. I was put in another ambulance. On my way there, paramedics had to continuously shock me to keep me alive. I didn’t feel a thing.
Forty-five minutes after I arrived, I went into a second cardiac arrest.
I later learned that after a cardiac arrest, it takes four minutes before the heart and lungs to shutdown completely, so the staff had a limited time to do open heart surgery and insert a biventricular assist machine which took over my heart and lung function, all while taking it in turns to resuscitate me for 45 minutes.
When I woke up the next morning, Jason, my mum, brother and sister were there.
But I hadn’t a clue what had happened.
Jason was by my bedside, his eyes red with tears.
I remember snapshots of conversations, of people trying to tell me things.
‘You have to speak, Holli. We need you to talk,’ Jason said.
Memories of my family holding my hand, trying to keep me warm,
They said I had weeks to live
flashedthrough my mind. Some time passed and I finally came to.
I couldn’t talk but I was desperate to communicate.
I scribbled down total nonsense until I came round properly. Jason explained what happened. ‘You contracted myocarditis, an infection which attacked your heart muscles and triggered two cardiac arrests,’ he said.
‘You’re hooked up to a biventricular assist machine which keeps the blood pumping.
‘Your heart isn’t working on its own at the moment.’
I had been hooked up to the machine for 10 days, and when I woke up, I wasn’t really aware of anything that had happened.
It was only until my family started talking about Jordan, that I actually remembered who he was.
Jason printed photos of Jordan and put posters up all over my room. It became like a shrine and we all called the room the ‘Jordan Suite’.
As I looked around me, the reality of my situation sank in.
How was this my life now? They had to put me on a transplant list for my heart.
‘You can’t be on the machine forever,’ the doctor said. ‘Eventually it will create more problems than it’s solving.’ Only a
heart donor could save me. I had two weeks – maybe three.
But Jason had something special in mind.
He asked the nurses if he could bring Jordan in.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ he said, walking in with Jordan in his arms. ‘Oh my God,’ I cried. ‘My beautiful baby boy.’ It was a dream come true. I was still half asleep when Jason lay him down on a pillow at my next to me on the bed. Jason told me he’d been crying a lot and had been difficult to feed and settle down over the past two weeks while I was in hospital. But as he lay there looking at me, he was as quiet as a mouse. Not being able to pick him up, soothe him, change him, or feed him was like a pain I can’t describe. I just wanted to go back to being his mum. I was still too weak to hold him, but I could touch his face, hold his hand and listen to his breathing. After a few minutes of being by my side,
dozed off. After a few hours of being with my son, Jason took Jordan home and returned the next morning with my sister. When he saw the machine by my headboard, he was puzzled.something had changed. It looked like my heart was beating by itself - but could that be the case? We called a nurse. ‘This is astonishing,’ she said. Doctors hurried in and couldn’t believe it. Since seeing my little boy, my heart had started working again. ‘We can’t take you off the machine straight away,’ the doctor said. ‘We need to be sure your heart is strong enough.’
They took me off the machine for 10 minutes at first, and my heart kept beating.
Then they tried me for 20 minutes, half an hour, and then a whole hour. It beat throughout. Eventually, I came off it permanently and my heart has worked on its own ever since. They took me off the transplant list, put me on a general ward, and started me on physiotherapy.
After a month, I returned home to Jason and Jordan.
I don’t know whether it was a miracle, but some of the nurses certainly thought it was.
Other people say it was the strength of a mother’s love.
All I know is that somehow, Jordan kept me fighting and he still keeps me determined to get better everyday.
Doctors had told me that my heart might improve by 80% at most, but just over two years later, I am now 100% better and have been given the green light to go ahead with normal activities.
Jordan is now two-and-a-half years old, and I love feeling strong enough to be a mum again.
Somehow my beautiful Jordan woke up my heart and I’ll keep loving him with it forever.
It had started beating again