AARP Hearing Center
About a month before Beth Ramsey started feeling crummy, she was hiking a glacier in Iceland. So, when she began having shortness of breath a few weeks after her 2022 trip, the then-59-year-old elementary school principal assumed it was bronchitis or another common illness.
With the symptom not subsiding, Ramsey decided to swing by the emergency room before heading out on her family’s summer vacation — car packed and all — to get checked out, and hopefully, she thought, to get some medication to knock out whatever was ailing her.
But she never did make it to that vacation with her grandkids. Ramsey spent a month in the hospital and another month in rehab before returning home with a new heart.
A ‘massive’ heart attack?
The emergency room doctors at the hospital near her home in Southern Maryland hooked Ramsey up to an EKG, or electrocardiogram, which checks the heart’s electrical activity. “When you’re 59 and you say you have shortness of breath, they immediately do an EKG,” says Ramsey, who is now 60.
That’s when the doctors told her that she was having a heart attack — “a massive one,” she remembers them saying. Next thing she knew, they were loading her into a helicopter.
“I was shocked,” recalls Ramsey, who was airlifted to MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., about 40 miles north from where she lived. There, she had a second test — what’s known as a cardiac catheterization — to look for any blockages that could be causing the heart attack. But none were found.
A third test assessed the strength of Ramsey’s heart, which had never given her trouble before. “And what they saw was that the strength of the heart was quite weak,” says Phillip H. Lam, M.D., one of Ramsey’s doctors and an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology physician at Washington Hospital Center.
Right away, the medical team put in a device called a balloon pump to try to stabilize Ramsey’s heart while they worked to figure out what was making it so sick in the first place.
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