In November 2021, Hillary Steffen lost her sense of taste and smell and thought she had COVID-19. While she also had a low-grade fever that started a few days earlier, it didn’t feel “alarming,” she says. But then she experienced something unusual.
“I woke up and my arms were tingling and numb and it went into my fingers,” the 36-year-old from Turner, Oregon, tells TODAY.com. “I felt nauseous and an overall discomfort.”
Doctors sent her to intensive care unit and conducted an echocardiogram. They learned her ejection fraction — a measure of how effectively the heart pumps, according to the American Heart Association — was less than 10% — a sign she was in heart failure. A normal ejection fraction is between 55% and 70%.
At that point, her care team realized she needed an Impella heart pump and placed one in her femoral artery in her leg. The pump helped her heart function better, But it was too soon to know if it could save her from more serious interventions.
Read the full coverage: Mom, 33, almost dies of heart failure due to COVID after dismissing these signs: ‘Really confused’
