Listen to Your Heart… & Body THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING CPR & YOUR HEART HEALTH BY LALITA CHEMELLO
This February, for Valentine’s Day, Hope DeJong will be celebrating what she and her family now call her “Death Day,” for the seventh year. Although it has evolved into a light-hearted and well-meaning joke to the family, it originally was the yearly reminder of a terrifying ordeal for Hope and her family. That fateful Valentine’s Day, Hope had fallen asleep on the couch while watching a movie to close out the festivities. The wellknown and unspoken rule of the DeJong home remained: you don’t wake mom up when she’s sleeping. And so, the family kept to that, and let Hope get her rest. But something was different this evening. Her two kids were already in bed, and her husband, Dave, was just getting ready to retire for the night himself when he says he heard Hope gasp or make a gurgling-like noise. When he approached the couch to check on her, he found her not breathing and unresponsive. He immediately called 9-1-1 and began chest compressions. Hope had gone into cardiac arrest, which is a problem with the “electrical” side of your heart, compared to a heart attack, which has to do with what Hope called “the plumbing.” She was under, or considered dead, for eight full minutes, which is incredibly detrimental to your brain function. She was placed in a medically-induced coma to help her body hopefully heal from the damage of the cardiac arrest, and give doctors time to assess the damage
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February 2022
that was already done. Her husband was being prepared at times for the worst, from organ donations if she didn’t survive, to the potential massive deficits Hope could wake up with, if she did wake up.
BUT THERE’S ANOTHER THING HOPE ALSO HAD TO WORK THROUGH, AND THAT WAS FORGIVING HERSELF FOR POSSIBLY MISSING THE SIGNS THAT SOMETHING WAS WRONG IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Yet, Hope’s story didn’t end in the hospital. She was, against many odds, able to walk out of the hospital after some time, but not without some issues. Doctors recommended speech and behavioral therapies to help work through some of her memory deficits, while also seeing a therapist to work through her feelings and experience of working through “getting back to normal.”
Just a couple of months before Hope’s cardiac event, she had undergone a second surgery, to correct issues with a Bariatric procedure she had prior. It was following this surgery she had found out she had become malabsorptive and her potassium essentially bottomed out, leading to the cardiac arrest. From the little bits that Hope recalls before the event, she does remember being tired and quite often miserable following that surgery. There was also a dinner, where Hope attempted to bend down to pick up the bill for a dinner out with a friend, and both noticed she had a hard time getting back up.
There were hard days, days she admittedly said she regretted being saved. Being a fiercely independent person prior to her cardiac arrest, Hope found herself increasingly frustrated with having to need any help, to having to be monitored 24 hours a day in the beginning because of her memory issues, and not being able to take care of herself, let alone her own family. But time, and the help of loved ones as well as professionals, helped Hope defeat her guilty feelings and obtain a little humbleness, as she says.
Were those memories definitive signs that something bigger was going on with Hope’s body? Maybe? Maybe not. But in the case of your heart, the organ vital to life as a whole, a bigger problem can sometimes present as some of the smallest things.
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