Friday, Jan 18, 2019 at 12:53
Rumpig is right on the mark. Nephews wife was 42, 3 kids, fit as a fiddle, no family history of any heart or circulatory systems - yet she dropped like a stone in front of him in the bedroom on a Saturday morning.
It turned out she had suffered SCAD - Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection. This is where the blood finds its way between the inner and outer layers of the artery, and then bursts the outer layer, like a blown hydraulic hose.
It's the equivalent of a heart attack, and the medical world is only just waking up to the fact that it happens a lot more than they thought. It regularly just happens to pick, fit healthy women in their 40's, who have had kids.
Bottom line for the nephews wife was she was revived 5 times before they got her to the docs in Fiona
Stanley Hospital - then the docs couldn't figure what had happened.
They thought she'd had a heart attack, and kept trying to get her heart started again, with no success - because the blood kept pouring out of the torn artery.
Meantimes, her formerly-good heart filled with congealed blood, and buggered it.
The docs cut her open and were horrified by what they found. They put a Heartmate 3 pump in her for 9 mths, hoping her heart would recover.
It didn't, so they shortlisted her for a full heart transplant.
Just over a year later, she got the new heart, and despite a few small hiccups, she's currently travelling
well.
It could have been a whole lot different story if she hadn't been whipped into intensive care, as fast as she was.
You never know what's going to strike you down. Brothers FIL had 6 brothers, and all 7 boys in that family dropped early from heart attacks, with one brother dropping dead by the
farm tractor at age 27.
The brothers FIL survived the longest, he dropped with a heart attack at age 62.
If you already have some kind of medical weakness, heat stress coupled with exercise, will soon exacerbate it.
Cheers, Ron.
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