Second
Chance
Life
At
by Brooke Ezzo
N
ow I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…
Lori Houser is no stranger to cardiac issues. She has lived with an irregular heartbeat called Tachycardia for as long as she can remember. But, nothing could have prepared her for the road she was about to travel. After having constant headaches for a couple of weeks in April of 2018, Lori went to the neurologist and had an MRI. “I had it done on a Friday and they called the following Monday, asking me if I was sitting down,” Lori said. “They told me I had a stroke.” Lori was in the best of shape of her life; she ate clean and organic, she ran and 46 | LANTANA LIVING
| March 2020
worked out multiple times a week, and played soccer. Her lifestyle showed no signs of disease. The doctors immediately got her in for testing.
“For the next three weeks I felt like a lab rat,” Lori said. “They poked and prodded me, did a bubble study to make sure there wasn’t a hole in my heart, and any other testing to find the cause of the stroke.” Without much luck, Lori had a heart monitor put in in May 2019. It’s called a loop recorder, and its main job is to find hidden rhythms that cause strokes. With another monitor next to her bed, the data is submitted to a device team. Each night, the monitors basically perform an ongoing EKG. “After two weeks, they called me and said the data showed I was in AFIB every four
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