quick

response meant survival during life-threatening heart attack

← MARY WENTZ of Fargo survived a life-threatening heart attack last May. “I didn’t think I was having a heart attack because I didn’t have any pain in the center of my chest,” she says.

Mary Wentz was just puttering around her house on a Saturday afternoon when she suffered a life-threatening heart attack.

“I didn’t think I was having a heart attack because I didn’t have any pain in the center of my chest,” the 66-year-old Fargo woman recalls.

Instead, Wentz first felt nauseous. Then both arms began to ache and she began feeling pain between her shoulder blades.

“It was a weird ache in my arms and I couldn’t pinpoint where the pain was coming from,” Wentz remembers. “Then the sweat just started pouring off me, like someone was pouring cups of water.”

That’s when Wentz called her friend and neighbor, Barb McCarty. McCarty, a retired licensed practical nurse, and her husband, Jay, who once worked as an emergency medical technician, came right away.

“We knew it was pretty urgent when she called,” McCarty says, describing her friend’s color as ashen when they arrived and found her in pain. “It was either a stroke or a heart attack and we knew she needed to get to the hospital.”

McCarty, who had worked as an Essentia Health pediatric nurse, recommended Wentz go to Essentia Health-Fargo for care and escorted Wentz into the emergency department.

The emergency department team quickly determined Wentz was suffering a life-threatening heart attack called an ST-elevated myocardial infarction (STEMI). A major artery in Wentz’s heart was 100 percent blocked, which meant a large part of her heart was not getting oxygen.

Dr. Samantha Kapphahn, an interventional cardiologist, and her team took Wentz into the cardiac catherization lab, where Kapphahn expertly threaded a tiny catheter into Wentz’s artery and placed two stents to open it up. It took only 45 minutes from the time Wentz arrived at the hospital to blood flow being restored to her heart. Wentz not only survived the heart attack but suffered minimal damage to her heart.

“Time is of the essence, and minutes can be a huge game-changer in who lives and who dies and who suffers irreversible heart damage,” Kapphahn explains.

Wentz appreciates not only how the team saved her life, but that Kapphahn also took time to clearly answer all her questions during her hospital stay. “Dr. Kapphahn is friendly and downto-earth,” Wentz says. “She lets you know it’s serious but she doesn’t talk down to you or shake her finger at you.”

Kapphahn says caring for a patient like Wentz in an emergency is where her work begins. “Then you build a relationship that helps prevent a patient from having another heart attack or prevents them from having heart failure that gets worse and affects their quality of life,” the cardiologist explains.

Kapphahn says women tend to dismiss heart-attack symptoms or attribute them to something else. “We need to be aware of the symptoms and seek medical attention immediately,” she advises. “More minutes put more heart muscle in jeopardy. That can mean the difference in surviving a cardiac event and making a good recovery.”