Katy couple's raising heart failure awareness after 3 near-death experiences
HOUSTON - A couple from Katy is raising awareness about congestive heart failure. What they thought was indigestion was much more serious than that. It has taken a year to overcome three near-death experiences for Mike Simmons. He didn't realize that it was his heart causing symptoms, ranging from fatigue to shortness of breath, and led to a three-month hospital stay.
"What I was feeling basically was a lot of pain in my abdomen and I thought that was really what the problem was, but it would turn out it was completely different," explains Simmons.
He was scheduled for a colonoscopy to try to scope out the source of pain. He had just gotten heart clearance for it through his pre-operative testing, but later that night, everything changed.
"I could not breathe anymore and started feeling very faint. Kelly rushed to call 911, thank God, and they showed up and immediately got me the ambulance. I had to be shocked, because my heart had completely stopped," says Simmons. His wife, Kelly, added, "By the time they were getting him into the ambulance, they were having to shock him because he had gone into cardiac arrest. He has no blockages, so it was not a heart attack. We're trying to spread the word about that, because it often gets confused about the difference."
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LifeFlight raced Simmons from Memorial Hermann in Katy to Memorial Hermann in The Texas Medical Center. Kelly was given a 2% chance that he would survive. "I could hear them say, we just lost him again, and I just started crying," recalls Kelly.
They soon found out that stomach pain was actually something called ischemia. Doctors told them when his heart wasn't functioning properly. It took blood and oxygen from his organs, throwing him into organ failure. "I woke up to my entire family and Kelly's family around me in the hospital. Basically, it was just a complete shock, and it was just mind boggling as to how bad it had really gotten. It ended up being one complication after another," says Simmons.
It took dozens of workers and 13 procedures to keep Mike Simmons alive. Critical Care Registered Nurse, Barbara Maffre, is one of them.
"It's such a collaborative effort. Everybody's always in communication, like minute-t -minute, because it is a minute-to-minute challenge, because things can change so quickly with these patients, that everybody has to be on board," says Maffre. "Everybody has to be communicating, and I think that the nurses on my unit are second to none in providing that communication and putting the pieces together and knowing what to look for, knowing how to intervene before things happen, if not as soon as they happen, because seconds count."
She says Mike's loving and supportive family also helped fuel his will to live. "I can remember the first time his son came to visit him, he just lit up! It's just those moments, where even how sick he was, Mike was always a good patient, in that he was always trying very hard to be positive when he was awake. He was, of course, sedated at times during his journey, but when he was awake, he was trying so hard to be positive and cooperative and to keep being strong for his family," states Maffre.
The good patient did need a lot of patience to even learn how to walk on his own again. His recovery bed still remains in his living room. Mike feels fortunate he didn't suffer brain damage. After all, he did die three times. "I think it's a miracle I'm still here, I think there's a reason for that and just need to spend more time, figuring out what that is," says a hopeful Simmons.
For more information visit the Memorial Hermann website.