Making Rounds
Medical emergency started with a yawn
Like a lot of moms, Sondra Bemesderfer spent a great deal of time taking care of everyone but herself. Even after a diabetes diagnosis 13 years ago, she was less concerned about her own health than doing a good job at work and taking care of her husband and two kids.
“My children are adults now,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter how grown your children get. You still worry.”
She knew she wasn’t managing her diabetes well, but she didn’t expect to end up in an ambulance at 53, in September of 2023.
“It started on the way home from work,” Sondra said. “I kept yawning. I didn’t feel tired, but it was like I just couldn’t get enough air. So I was yawning, over and over.”
Thinking it might be COVID, she took a test at her Hope Mills home, but it was negative.
“So I thought maybe pneumonia or bronchitis,” Sondra said. “I knew something was going on, because I just couldn’t catch a full breath of air.”
She changed out of her work clothes and sat down. Then things took a turn for the worse.
“I couldn’t get a breath at all,” she said. “Did you ever fall down hard and just have the air knocked out of you? That’s what it was like.”
Gasping, she called 911. Within minutes, an ambulance arrived, bringing a flurry of activity into her living room.
As the emergency crew started an ECG to measure her heart activity, Sondra’s children arrived. Her son, Paul, is a registered nurse.
“He’s watching the monitor,” she said, “and I hear him say, ‘She’s having a STEMI.’ And I thought, no. That’s not right.”
A STEMI is an ST-elevation myocardial infarction, a heart attack rooted in the heart’s lower chambers.
“I’m still thinking it’s pneumonia,” Sondra said. “I had no chest pain, no pain in my arms, nothing in my shoulders. It just didn’t feel like I thought a heart attack would feel.”
Next thing she knew, she was being transported to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center. There, cardiologist Mathhar Aldaoud, MD, confirmed that she was having a STEMI and would need a cardiac catheterization.
“Even there, on that table, I was worried about my family,” she said. “I thought, oh gosh, I might die. Do they know who my life insurance is through? They don’t know how to get into my phone or my laptop.”
Dr. Aldaoud placed three stents to reestablish healthy blood flow in Sondra’s blocked artery.
“It was blocked about 90 percent,” she said. “But what triggered the whole thing was a blood clot. That’s what caused my shortness of breath, and when it went through my artery, it hit the blockage. So the blocked artery would have caused a heart attack at some point anyway, but that day it might have kept the clot from traveling to my brain and causing a stroke.”
“Everyone was wonderful and took great care of me, but there’s nothing that will change the way you take care of yourself more than an experience like that.” - Sondra Bemesderfer
With the clot removed and the stents placed, Sondra was feeling a lot better. She began taking blood thinners to help prevent future clots and was discharged to recover at home. After an adjustment in her blood pressure medication led to pulmonary edema, she returned to the hospital.
“I ended up having two more stents placed then,” she said. “So there’s a total of five now. But it’s so odd, you just don’t feel them. Once they’re placed, you have no idea that anything’s in there.”
After learning the blood clot that triggered her heart attack was likely caused by her unmanaged diabetes, Sondra became much more vigilant about monitoring her glucose, staying on her medications and watching her diet.
“Looking back, you can see how it was kind of a domino effect,” she said. “You don’t see it all happening, but then you’re in an ambulance.”
Sondra is grateful for the quick actions of everyone she encountered after calling 911 that day.
“I have to thank God because everything played out perfectly,” she said. “It couldn’t have been scripted better than that.”
For her son, the registered nurse, the experience inspired a career move: he joined Cape Fear Valley’s Rapid Response Team, an interdisciplinary team of clinical professionals deployed to the bedside of a patient whose condition is rapidly declining.
“He said he was really impressed,” she said. “He’s been an RN since 2018, and he was really impressed with how quickly it went, from the time it all started to the time I was on the cath table.”
Recalling the worries she had about her family during the procedure, Sondra said she quickly got some things in order, organizing information about things such as insurance and passwords in case of an emergency.
With that peace of mind, and her healthier new habits, Sondra hopes it will be a long time before she sees the inside of an ambulance again.
“Everyone was wonderful and took great care of me,” she said. “But there’s nothing that will change the way you take care of yourself more than an experience like that.”
Hear more of Sondra’s story at capefearvalley.com/heart.
