I've just been diagnosed with this very scary disease July 17, 2012. To start, I have 3 kids, 2 teenagers from a previous relationship, I got married 3 years ago to a nice man that didn't have any kids so I wanted to give him a child, my pregnancy was very challenging, I was very tired, when I did try to do things like go shopping, I could barely walk through the store, when I get back to my car, my breathing would be so heavy, but I always catched my breathe in like a minute and would be fine. That happened in my second trimester and that's also when my feet and ankles started swelling and the Doctor told me that all these are normal pregnancy signs, I even looked up all signs and yeah they are supposingly normal. Although I still worked as a homecare nurse during the midnight shift so that was easy to do. I worked through to my ninth month. In my last trimester I actually started feeling a lot better, I could go shopping without getting short of breathe but still got tired because I was so big.
Well it came the time to give birth on June 20th, which didn't go well starting out with the epidural the anesthesiologist stuck me 4 times before he finally got it during the process it was very painful, then my babies heart started to decelerate and they had to do an emergency c-section, my baby was ok and healthy and beautiful Thank God. Than here goes the beginning to recovery, being all drugged up, I was starting to exhibit headaches, told the nurses and Docs, but they didn't think it was nothing. We was sent home everything was fine except for my bad headaches, went to my doc he directed me to the hospital anesthesiologist. She told me that I had a spinal headache due to them puncturing a membrane, I had to either drink a lot of caffiene in 24hrs or come back to the E.R for them to do a procedure. So thankfully the caffeine worked.
During all that my feet, ankles and legs were so swollen I couldn't wear my flip flops. In which I did ask the ob-gyn about this, he said it was normal and it would go away. So it did go away after a couple of weeks, I was feeling fine than a week later I went to sleep and woke up feeling aliitle funny breathing so I did some breathing exercises and felt fine all day until the next morning the same thing happened and I did the same thing, I was fine until again it happened and breathing exercises didn't work, I had to call the ambulance, once they got me to the hospital, did a x-ray, found fluid in my lungs and my heart enlarged, they immediately gave me I.V lasix and Nitro, my BP and HR were so high, I was on 4L of O2, once the fluid began draining I began to feel better. They did a echo and reults showed 25% EF, so they sent me to ICU to monitor me, I did well on all the meds, all my labs came back normal, I lost a lot of weight. I felt and been feeling very well, like the way I did before I got pregnant. I went to see the cardiologist, he told me that I could still work and do physical activities as tolerated and in 3 months they will perform another echo and if my EF go to 30-35% I should be ok, if not I'll need a difribillator, I really hope I won't NEED that.
All being said, I'm still scared, I'm hoping and praying everyday, I'm trying to enjoy life and my beautiful baby, I have anxiety on experiencing those symptoms again.
July 5 2013, I was given a nuclear stress test, which was a scary experience because they gave me the medicine to raise my heart rate instead of exercising, but I got my results and thankfully everything is normal, also meaning normal EF, my EF now is 57%, oh man that number look so good. My heartvirsary is on July 17th it would be a year, it took a year to recover, and what a year this has been, I don't even want to get into the details, but I'm sure all other survivors can get the picture. I thank God, for He is the spirit that carried me through. I also want to thank my mom and husband for standing by my side and dealing with my emotional roller coasters and everything else, Live, Love Life
My Details
- Date Diagnosed: 17/07/2012
- Child: 3
- Initial EF: 25%
- Current EF: 57%
Story By Candace Davis