Jessica Grib shares her experience with peripartum cardiomyopathy to raise awareness of the heart failure that occurs in pregnant people.
When Jessica Grib of St. Louis was about 32 weeks pregnant with her second child, her blood pressure started rising. At the time, the then-30-year-old thought little of it.
“I wasn’t really concerned,” Grib, now 36, told TODAY. “I didn’t think that anything was going to happen.”
Her doctor prescribed her medication, but her blood pressure didn’t lower. Even bed rest did little to help. After delivering the baby, Grib went into cardiac arrest. She learned she had peripartum cardiomyopathy, a type of heart failure or weakness of the heart muscle that occurs at the end of pregnancy or within the first five months of delivery, Grib’s doctor, Dr. Kathryn Lindley, director of the Women’s Health Center at Vanderbilt University, told TODAY. The rare condition can be hard to detect because it mimics pregnancy symptoms, according to the American Heart Association.
When blood pressure medication and bed rest did little to help Grib, her doctor suggested delivering her baby at 37 weeks. She agreed. At the last minute, the baby, Amelia, turned breech, and doctors needed to perform a cesarean section. As Grib lay in the recovery room, she started crashing.
As staff tried to bring her to the cardiac catheterization lab, a room with diagnostic equipment that can generate images of the heart, she needed CPR for 10 minutes.
“It was very obvious that I was having a heart event,” Grib explained. “One of the nurses was a new father himself, and his whole mantra was, ‘We’re not going to lose her.’”
Doctors implanted an Impella heart pump, and she was later transferred to another hospital, where she was placed on ECMO, a type of life-support machine that works like external heart and lungs, according to the American Thoracic Society. The two devices worked together to support her while her heart recovered.
“I was basically on maximal life support hours after my daughter was born,” Grib said. “They definitely had no idea what was happening with me.”
Read the full article: Mom, 30, details her experience with heart failure that mimics pregnancy symptoms
