The last thing Mary Tenney remembered on Jan. 14, 2020, was walking into the Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center emergency room.
Eight days later, she awoke in a hospital bed in Cleveland, hooked up to various tubes and wires. She was surrounded by her family, who were surprised and thankful she was alive.
In the coming days, Mrs. Tenney would soon learn that her heart had stopped twice. She had endured 47 minutes of CPR. Among those who had helped save her life was nurse Katrina Forbes, a friend and former colleague of Mrs. Tenney’s at St. Vincent.
Mrs. Tenney, now 37, said it felt like she had been hit by a truck.
“I got up as soon as I could and I was in so much pain from all of that CPR,” the Lambertville resident recalled. “I don’t know how they didn’t break any ribs … It was the worst pain I had ever been in. It hurt to cough, and it hurt to breathe.”
Mrs. Tenney was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and two other conditions in 2012 after she gave birth to her third child, she said. She shared her story in correlation with American Heart Month, meant to raise awareness about heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.
The day before she arrived at the ER that January day, Mrs. Tenney said her homecare nurse had raised concerns.
“She said my blood pressure was very low and that it just didn’t look good,” Mrs. Tenney said. “We were hesitant [to go to the ER] because we’ve been through this before, but we went nonetheless.”
By the end of the night on Jan. 14, she was unresponsive.
‘One more round’
Ms. Forbes walked into work at St. Vincent’s ICU the next morning and soon learned from her boss about their former colleague’s condition.
That’s when the code blue was called, Ms. Forbes said, meaning a patient is having a medical emergency such as a cardiac arrest.
Ms. Forbes rushed to Mrs. Tenney’s room and started doing CPR on her with other nurses.
“It was emotional for everybody there,” Ms. Forbes said.
Ms. Forbes walked out of the room and ran into a cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Christopher Phillips, who could tell something was wrong.
“He said ‘Honestly, the only option is, if you’re able to get a pulse back, we can put her on ECMO,’ and I said, ‘Absolutely,” Ms. Forbes said.
Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, is a form of life support for people in situations where their heart or lungs are affected.
At the time, only a few staff were trained to put a patient on ECMO until they could be transferred to another facility, Ms. Forbes said.
Ms. Forbes said she then walked back into Mrs. Tenney’s room, after 25 minutes of CPR, and asked: “Can we do one more round?”
“She had three children at that time and I was doing compressions on her,” Ms. Forbes said. “I remember speaking to her, and I remember telling her, ‘This isn’t it. You’ve got three babies at home. Come on, Mary.’
“During that last round of CPR, we were able to get a pulse back and we were able to put her on ECMO and transfer her out to Cleveland Clinic that evening.”
Life support
Mrs. Tenney said she was given a 5 percent chance of survival after she was transferred.
“They weren’t sure of my neurological function when I was at St. Vincent’s, but being down as long as I was, things didn’t look good,” she said.
After Mrs. Tenney’s husband and children were given her odds of survival, they went to visit her in the hospital to say their goodbyes.
Her heart wasn’t working on its own and she almost lost a leg, a common occurrence with patients on ECMO, Mrs. Tenney said.
“A lot of times this happens with the ECMO because the tubes that they put in are very large,” Mrs. Tenney said. “They compress the vasculature and therefore restricts blood flow to that limb. A lot of people on ECMO actually lose their limbs and I came very close but, luckily, after six days, I was stable enough to where they could take me off of the ECMO.”
Eighteen hours after Mrs. Tenney was taken off of life support, she woke up.
‘Mom, you’re alive’
Soon, she was visited by her husband and children, who were overjoyed to see her, Mrs. Tenney said.
The last time they’d seen her was when she wasn’t breathing, and connected to multiple tubes and lines.
“I was still processing everything but you could tell that my kids were really affected by it,” Mrs. Tenney remembered. “They were like ‘Mom, you look so good,’ and ‘Oh my gosh, mom, you’re alive.’”
She’d gained 52 pounds from the fluids that were injected into her body, Mrs. Tenney said.
Her husband was relieved and grateful.
“He cried constantly while I was in the hospital and I couldn’t understand why, because I couldn’t process that I was, essentially, dead for 47 minutes,” she said.
“When we got home, he had kept a journal for me and journaled everything, every day about my progress and how I needed to come back to him and how I needed to be there for our girls.”
‘Don’t wait’
“If I hadn’t gotten help when I did, I could’ve arrested at home and there would’ve been no chance of surviving that,” Mrs. Tenney said.
Today she takes proactive measures to cope with her congestive heart failure symptoms, such as taking her medicine, checking her weight every day to make sure she hasn’t gained two to five pounds in two days, going to cardiac rehab, and getting screened for medical issues annually.
“A lot of the time, women don’t experience classic heart attack symptoms and women tend to put things off,” Ms. Forbes said. “They’re like ‘Oh, it’s just heartburn. I’ll just take a couple pills and I’ll be fine.’
“But in reality, that little bit of heartburn they felt was actually their heart, not heartburn. Women tend to do that, especially 30 to 40 year-old women.”
Dr. Ameer Kabour, chief of cardiology at Mercy Health, said he frequently runs into patients who shrug off symptoms like chest pain and high blood pressure because they think it’s something else, like heartburn or stress, when it’s more serious. This is why it’s important to visit a physician when something is unusual, he said.
Dr. Kabour suggests people have their weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar checked once or twice a year, he said.
“The outcome of waiting could be devastating,” Dr. Kabour said.
First Published February 4, 2023, 12:00 p.m.
