I was about six months pregnant, and I realized I was having congestive heart failure issues. I told my husband that I needed to go to the emergency room, and they ended up admitting me. And I was there for 10 days before I gave birth. My son was three months early.
After going home, I slowly declined. I was losing weight, and I actually called my mom, and I told her, you know, my heart just feels like it's going to stop.
She was in another institution, and we knew when she came over here in cardiogenic shock that she'd be very complicated. Her heart was not actually providing adequate enough blood flow to the rest of her body. Her liver and her kidneys were starting to fail.
She was on several medications that were artificially keeping her heart alive, and we had to think quickly to find a way to find a solution for her. And it became evident that we could not fix her issue medically or with devices, and her best option would have been transplant. It was us, critical care, CT surgery, pulmonology.
And essentially, we decided that we needed to have a game plan for how we were going to take the heart out, what type of heart we were going to accept, and how we were going to implant it. We reached out to our 3D printing team, and we actually asked them to reconstruct Promise's insides so that we could plan better. The knowledge we utilized with the 3D renderings and planning for her surgery was absolutely crucial for such a complicated case.
This was going to be a long surgery, so we used a heart in the box so that we could have time to actually take the current heart out and put the new one in. We were able to take separate pieces of technology and cater our therapies and tailor it for Promise.
I knew the doctors were going to do what they needed to do to get me on the list, give me my heart. But I think them knowing that I had a 3-month-old son was just as much motivation for them as it was for me.
It's a completely different world when you come to the Mayo Clinic. They care. They want to make you better. When you're on that table, and you know that you're going through with the surgery, you just have to find some type of motivation. And I just kept thinking about Paxton and making it through so I can hold him again.
She was a fighter. She went into the surgery knowing that she may not come out of it. When we have technology, it provides us more knowledge than what we had a year ago. And taking that knowledge is imperative for us to identify how can we do better for our patients, how can we prevent problems for our patients, and most importantly, how can we do things now that we couldn't do a year or two ago. Now with this technology, the answer is yes.
First time I was able to hold Paxton after transplant was probably — was up there with the first time I got to see him after he was born. It was like a new life had been started, and I knew I was going to be here for the long haul and to watch him grow up. Holding him for the first time was when I actually came to. And I was like, okay, I made it. I'm here. Time to be a mom. Let's go.
