Tara talks about having a spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD - a tear in the wall of a heart artery), not knowing that she had heart failure.

Transcript

And my husband’s a paramedic, so he came home and I asked him to take my blood pressure and everything was fine, like I said, it was transient. Monday morning, I got up and I went to work for a full 12 hour day. And Tuesday morning I woke up to do my barre fitness class and during my barre fitness class, I was feeling extreme fatigue and heaviness. When I woke up, they were doing CPR on me. 

I was whisked away to our local hospital cardiac unit and through a series of events I was discharged from ICU 10 days later. I went home not knowing I had heart failure, which may sound very silly, because I’m myself a nurse. But I got home and just thought that I was just going to some time to get better. And I was in contact with my work, and I was consoling friends and family that I was going to be fine. And it was probably, people talked to me about my diet and how it would need to change. They talked to me about limitations I might have. They talked to me about all these things, that now in retrospect pointed towards a diagnosis of heart failure, but no one said it to me, or I didn’t hear it. So, my husband at one point, I overhead him telling somebody that I had heart failure. And I was aghast. I was like ‘What? I have heart failure?’. I just thought that I’d had an ‘event’ and that wasn’t any lingering damage. But there was severe damage. So I had what was called a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, SCAD. So, one of my arteries dissected spontaneously, I never had any heart disease of any health concerns, prior to this.

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