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Nearly at her due date and seemingly healthy, one 27-year-old woman says a bizarre symptom had her rushing to the hospital — where she soon had to undergo an emergency C-section and open-heart surgery.
MK Campbell from Texas was 35 weeks pregnant when she awoke to a scary sensation in her chest.
“[I] rolled over in bed one night and [I] felt a pop in [my] chest,” she said, adding that when she sat up, the pain felt like “like there’s a piece of steak stuck in your throat.”
Unable to get the pain to subside, Campbell’s husband rushed her to the ER, where a medical team administered a high-contrast CT scan.
She remembers hoping and praying that what she was experiencing was extreme heartburn, but the test revealed a much more dangerous situation.
Doctors reported that Campbell’s aorta was dissecting, and they needed to do emergency surgery to save her life.
Aortic dissection is a potentially fatal condition in which a tear forms in the inner layer of the aorta, the body’s main artery. It can slow or block blood flow to the heart, causing a heart attack, abnormalities in heart rhythm or sudden death.
Within two hours of her diagnosis, Campbell was in the operating room undergoing an emergency C-section.
“As soon as they’re done stitching you up from that, they’re gonna crack your chest and do open heart surgery for 12 hours and put you on bypass for eight hours,” she recalled.
When she emerged from her grueling double surgery, Campbell discovered her baby was in the NICU. She was sent to the ICU and, later, the cardiac floor.
The new mom was released after just a week, with hospital staff “shocked and amazed” at her rapid recovery, owed in part to her being “young and healthy.”
A few days after her release, Campbell’s healthy baby was discharged, and mother and child spent three weeks healing at home together.
“It’s super hard,” Campbell shared, noting there was “a lot of pain,” but she was happy to be home.
All seemed well until a post-op appointment with her cardiologist revealed truly troubling results: She had cardiomyopathy and was in full-fledged heart failure at 27 years old.
Campbell also explained that she has Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissue.
Patients typically experience complications related to the heart, blood vessels, bones, joints, and eyes.
The aortic dissection that could have cost Campbell her life was “directly related” to Marfan’s.
While she tested negative for the condition as a child, she fit the criteria “to a tee.”
Demonstrating her double-jointedness, she explained that she also has the telltale symptoms of “terrible teeth, bad eyes, scoliosis, enlarged sciatic root, and mitral valve prolapse.”
It wasn’t until she was pregnant and her aortic root began to dilate that her cardiologist felt comfortable diagnosing her with Marfan’s.
As Marfan’s is a genetic condition, Campbell plans on having her daughter tested, as she has a 50% chance of carrying it.
“I knew the risk when I got pregnant. Up until this point, I have lived an incredibly normal life, an incredibly normal, unrestricted life, and I expect that to be the same case for my daughter,” she said.
English (US)