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>> Tonight.
>> I thought I had a bad cold or something, I just had trouble breathing. I went to bed,
three days later I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat.
>> Am ABC 27 special presentation.
>> He didn't know how bad he was. He didn't know how we almost lost him.
>> Penn State Hershey Heart and Vascular Institute presents Heart to Heart brought to you by
Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
>> Good evening I'm Chuck Rhodes. February is American Heart Month and tonight specialists
from Penn State Hershey Heart and Vascular Institute are in the ABC 27 call center to
answer your questions. Call the number on the bottom of the screen, or you can email
your question during the show to questions@abc27.com. Nurse practitioner Mary Lou Osevala will answer
your emails throughout tonight's calls and keep in mind always your calls and emails
are always confidential. We begin tonight with Deborah Pinkerton to share one patient's
story with you.
>> Thanks Chuck. A Cumberland County man thought he had a cold, a bad cold, but he was wrong,
very wrong.
>> There's no better feeling than to be out, feeling the wind blowing over you, just being
out in the open air, it's just something you can't really describe, you got to experience.
>> 35 year old Jason Wetzel is experiencing it now. It's always been a dream of his to
own a motorcycle.
>> It's something that I've wanted for a long time to just experience and I finally can
now.
>> Jason's dream was put on hold for many years until this past summer.
>> After everything that happened I decided you know this was the year. It's something
I wanted and not many people get a second chance at their dreams to do and fulfill so
I went ahead and took the plunge and did it.
>> Jason knows how quickly dreams can be snatched away. His dream was almost lost 14 months
ago.
>> I just was having some chest discomfort and was getting short of breath and just really
just felt like a chest cold, is really what it felt like.
>> About two weeks before Christmas he went to the doctor and they gave him an antibiotic
and some congestion in his chest but no big deal.
>> He gave me some antibiotics and he gave me an inhaler and said you know when you get
out of breath use the inhaler so I did that for a couple of weeks.
>> But Jason's condition did not improve. A few days after Christmas he was still sick.
>> I was not feeling well, I feel asleep downstairs on the chair. My wife she woke me up she said
Jason she says you're already asleep she says why don't you get up and go to bed. Well I
got to the top of the stairs and I was really out of breath, really didn't think nothing
of it.
>> He had been snoring very, very, very bad and he's always been a snorer but nothing
to the point where I've had to leave my bed and two nights I had been sleeping on the
couch, two nights before and I believe it was the Lord. I didn't sleep on the couch
that night.
>> It's a good thing because around 3:15 in the morning Jason's snoring woke up Melanie.
>> I noticed it was not snoring and I thought it was actually him having a bad dream and
I proceeded to try to wake him up, come on dear you're having a bad dream, wake up and
he obviously did not wake up. He was making very gurglish type noises and I screamed.
Both my kids came over and my mother in law at the time was living with us and she even
came up stairs because I was so distraught and I immediately was really like just shaking
him very hard and I knew something was wrong and I got 911 on the phone. She's like you
need to stay with me is he breathing and at that point he was but it wasn't too long when
he stopped breathing and my kids were just screaming and just saying this isn't happening,
this isn't happening to us. I had taken CPR and first aid years and years ago and now
all of a sudden I had to use it again, again no actually for the first time on a real body
and it was my husband’s.
>> Jason's life was in her hands. The 911 operator talked Melanie through CPR.
>> Praise the Lord I had my mother in law with me. Her son, she and I were a team. She
did the breaths, I did the compressions, in moments I had these at I mean just totally
controlled men and women coming through my door totally taking over for me.
>> They found him in ventricular fibrillation which is a very abnormal rhythm that causes
cardiac arrest.
>> They revived him enough I guess at that point to be able to transport him to the hospital.
>> Well she basically saved his life by being able to provide CPR until the ambulance came
home.
>> Jason's situation as he came here to Hershey Medical Center was very poor. He came in in
advanced cardiogenic shock, that means his heart was not able to pump enough blood in
his vessels to restore his circulation.
>> I felt like a total I mean just a shadow over me like this is not really happening.
This is not happening to me.
>> Our suggested treatment was to put him on ECMO, that's Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.
We are taking blood from the right side of the heart, pushing the blood through an artificial
lung through a pump and from this pump the blood is re-circulated to the aorta and that
means we are replacing the function of the heart and the lung.
>> I knew nothing about this ECMO machine. This is how they described it to us: We're
going to give his heart a rest, it needs to rest.
>> RN's like Carol Dziedzina are responsible for patients like Jason.
>> There's a nurse at the bedside 24-7 and you're responsible for monitoring their vital
signs, any changes that occur in the ECMO, any changes that occur just in the patient,
that you visually see along with monitoring lab values and so forth. Generally the patient
at this point is so sick that we usually have them sedated so they're not aware of what
is going on.
>> As you can imagine it was a very difficult time for the entire family. Decisions were
being made on how to save Jason's life. You will see the rest of his story in a few minutes.
Chuck.
>> Thank you Deborah now joining us on the desk is Dr. Christoph Brehm. Doctor, we watched
that whole development, how it came about, what they treated and so on. What caused these
problems with Jason's heart?
>> So in Jason it was a dilative cardiomyopathy and in the acute situation he probably had
an additional viral infection and that basically tipped his situation over the edge and he
got decompensated.
>> And responded quickly. Now here's a very common question. Laypeople such as myself
get this wrong all the time. Explain the difference between cardiac arrest and a heart attack.
>> So in a cardiac arrest your heart basically stops pumping blood, that means your complete
circulation is stopped and in a heart attack the blood flowed to your cardiac to your heart
muscle is impaired, which is different but if it's severe it can lead into a heart arrest.
>> Alright now, we always hear chest pains, that's a logical very open, very common symptom
for a heart attack. Talk about some other sides that people maybe don't think of as
being.
>> So while chest pain might be the leading symptom, you can have pain that's going into
your arm or going into your back, even going into your jaw or your teeth could be possible,
or severe abdominal pain all those could be signs and symptoms of a heart attack.
>> Now we saw in our report that the procedure they call ECMO, I'm only quoting what they
say because I can't say it because I can't say the official name. Now that was used in
his case, talk about some other situations where you might employ that procedure.
>> So normally we are using ECMO or ECMO is commonly used in two situations. One in the
heart failure situation like Jason was in and the other one is in severe respiratory
failure, we also call that ARDS.
>> Now respiratory failure how do you employ it in that procedure? How does that work?
>> So in respiratory failure it's working like we're draining the patient's blood out
of the patient's body with a pump and that's put through an oxygenator and got oxygenated
and then we can rest the patient lungs and give them a chance to heal while the machine
is doing the work.
>> You actually take the blood out
>> Have to take blood out with a pump that's going to an oxygenator, that's oxygenated,
then is going back into the patient, then we can we can reduce the set ups on the ventilator
so the lungs have a chance to heal.
>> Now this ECMO procedures is this pretty common is it available in a lot of hospitals?
>> It's not available in a lot of hospitals because you need a lot of staff and you need
a lot of specialists to do that so if patients are in other hospitals are pretty sick and
they need ECMO support we have the ability to go out with a team to go there to see the
patient in the other hospital to put them on ECMO there, transfer him back to Penn State
Hershey for further medical management.
>> Amazing development over the years how this comes about. Thank you doctor for joining
us here tonight. At this point we're going to check back in with Deborah in the ABC 27
call center.
>> Thanks Chuck we are getting a lot of calls here and they're ranging from all different
calls from pediatric calls to adult calls regarding heart disease, once again you can
call 346-3333 or email your questions to questions@abc27.com. Now here to answer our first viewer question
is interventional cardiologist Dr. Mark Kozak. Thanks for being with us.
>> My pleasure.
>> This is the first question. My son was born with congenital heart disease specifically
coarctation of the aorta If we were to have more children what is the risk they will have
the same disease?
>> Well the overall if one child is born with congenital heart disease, the estimate is
that each subsequent child will have a 3 to 5 percent chance of having congenital heart
disease but it does not guarantee that it will be the same type of congenital heart
disease. So the number in 3 to 5 percent sounds large but overall 1% of all children born
will have some type of congenital heart disease so it's a slightly increased risk.
>> Ok thanks so much and we will have more of your questions coming up plus we'll have
the rest of Jason's story.