‘I developed heart failure in my 20s’: This Woman’s Battle With The Chronic Medical Condition Will Teach You To Value Your Own Life
Monique Acosta House has shared her chilling story to remind us to take our health seriously. The young woman pictured above knew something was wrong with her health when she started feeling really tired during her senior year of college. Still, she wrote it off as a typical college student thing.
Sharing her story with Yahoo Lifestyle, Monique said:
“I started having a lot of left arm pain and I was sleeping any time I wasn’t working or in class. I was trying to lose weight and was running a lot — I thought it had something to do with that.”
But when Monique fainted during a run, she went to the doctor. There, she was given a stress test and was told she was out of shape. So, she left and went about life as usual. But on one Sunday, she felt so terrible that she went to the emergency room.
“Doctors were like, ‘Wow. Your heart rate is all over. Your pulse is erratic. Something is wrong with you,’” Monique recalls.
She was asked to come back the following day for additional testing, but House was hesitant given that she had to go to work that day. Eventually, she promised to come back before work.
The next day, she underwent an echocardiogram, a test that uses an ultrasound to take pictures of your heart. Monique shared further:
“The technician took a long time to do the testing. He left at one point and brought back the radiologist. They were talking in hushed tones and I kept saying, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get to work,’ but they urged me to stay.”
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Eventually, Monique says, a cardiologist came in and gave her a diagnosis: heart failure.
“The doctor said, ‘We don’t even understand how you’re able to function. It’s critical. We need to admit you now’. The left side of my heart wasn’t pumping the way it should.”
Monique was hospitalized for about a week while she underwent testing. She was given blood thinners and other medication before she was discharged. She further narrated:
“It was very overwhelming because my biological mother died at 20 in her sleep and it was due to a heart-related condition. At this point, I was 21. I automatically thought I had the same thing she had. My grandmother raised me and I thought about how this would impact her. She had already lost one daughter.”
Monique says that calling her grandmother about her diagnosis was “the hardest conversation I’ve ever had to have.” Monique was specifically diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, which means the exact cause of her heart failure was unknown.
“They said it could have been viral or genetic,” she says. “What they did know was that it was critical.”
After she was discharged, Monique enrolled in a study and went on a heart failure drug that was under trial. “It saved my life,” she says. The young woman eventually started her career and, she says, stopped taking her medication. She says:
“I was fine on my medication, I had just gotten married, and I took a corporate job. You think you’re immortal. My pill regimen did not fit in with my lifestyle and I was lazy about taking my medication.”
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But she started having extreme fatigue again in her mid-30s.
“I was pretty functional. I did have spells where I wasn’t doing well, but I was able to have a child which was tremendous.”
Overall, Monique says she was living a “relatively normal life” but her heart function got so low that she needed a defibrillator, a machine that sends an electric current to the heart to control irregular heartbeats. She adds:
“It was a lifesaving measure but it was also traumatic because, when you get shocked, you realize you could have died. I would just go about my day and get shocked. It felt like someone hit me in the chest with a bowling ball.”
Sadly, in 2013, Monique’s grandmother passed away. She says:
“I grieved very hard. I stopped exercising and that was my bridge to health. My heart failure really started to pick up after that.”
Every time Monique’s defibrillator would shock her, it would cause the muscle in her heart to deteriorate. Eventually, she was told she needed a heart transplant. At the time, her ejection fraction (a measurement of how well your heart is pumping) was just 15 percent. (A normal ejection fraction is 50 to 70 percent, according to the American Heart Association.).
She says: “I was surprised. In my mind, I was still okay.” But at the time, she was so sick that she would have to stay in bed before and after a busy weekend. She would also sit in her car at the grocery store for a long time until she felt like she could walk to the store without passing out.
“It wasn’t a great quality of life but it was good enough. It turns out, I was really, really sick.”
Monique was put on a heart transplant list in January 2017 and received a new heart seven months later. The transplant wasn’t seamless: Monique’s transplanted heart stopped working during the surgery and she was in the intensive care unit for 10 days after her surgery.
She also had a “severe reaction” to one of the medications and needed to go on dialysis. “I spent a total of 70 days in the hospital,” she says.
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Now, though, Monique says she’s “fantastic.” “I’ve been through so much but I have so much to live for,” she says. “I just celebrated my two year heart-iversary and I got to shovel snow this year for the first time. People are like, ‘What do you mean you ‘got’ to shovel snow?’ But it’s a big deal for me.”
Now, Monique volunteers with the American Heart Association and urges other people to take their heart health seriously. She says:
“Seventy percent of heart disease is preventable. Value your life. I do, and I’m better than okay. I have a purpose.”