What Happened?

About 12:30, Sunday morning, July 24, Mom was visiting her two brothers (Karl & George) and took a fall in her room landing flat on her back. Karl called 911, they came, did an KEG on her and diagnosed a heart attack and whisked her off to the QEII hospital Emergency ward where further tests concluded that she did not have a heart attack, but irregular heart beat, thus the fainting. She was fitted with an external pace maker (which contracts the entire heart and can be painful) and taken to the Cath lab in the cardiovascular unit. We were told that they would take 20 minutes to settle her in and we could wait in the waiting room.

About an hour later, we were told that she had actually been taken into the cath Lab to be fitted with a temporary Pacemaker that sits on the outside of her body with a wire that goes down into her heart. Mom's brothers went home. Shortly after that, around 4:30, a nurse came in to see me and said things had gotten considerably worse. Mom's heart was no longer beating on its own at all and that they were doing CPR and had put her on a respirator.

By 5:30, they were more hopeful after they had put the Pacemaker in, but they were going to do a dye test to see if she had suffered a heart attack. She would be very sore and may have suffered broken ribs from the CPR. By 6:30, the resident came in and went over the whole thing again and said they found a blockage in the artery on the right side of her heart. And were going to put a blood pump in and open up the artery. They said that they will not be able to tell if there has been any neurological/brain damage until they have watched her for a day or more. The critical time after a heart attack is the first 72 hours, so we will see how things go. Later, the nurse came in and said that the Pacemaker was working, but she was still seated and has a breathing tube.