Lisa and Janet became friends after having similar experiences — and they celebrated their clean bill of health together.
"I'd just finished speaking to students at Southern Utah University and was walking down the hall with my supplies when suddenly I was out of breath," says Janet, who's an advocate for the hospital in occupational health, patient experience, and nursing.
"I'm only 51 so didn't think much of it," she says. "I decided to go home and rest, but I still couldn't breathe and wasn't at all feeling like myself. So my best friend Chris Thompson, the ER nurse manager, encouraged me to come back to the hospital. One of my nurse friends who just became a nurse practitioner checked my vitals and said, 'I know you don't want to be checked into the emergency room, but you have all those grandbabies. I'm worried about you and want to make sure you're OK.' With that urging, I was tested, and my blood pressure was 170 over 100."
The caregivers immediately began to administer what she needed to bring her blood pressure down, including nitroglycerin. "I'm a nurse, and knew the nitro was going to dump my blood pressure fast," says Janet. "I was really scared I'd pass out or stop breathing from the morphine. Kimm Wilde, an ER nurse, told me, 'I'll sit right here with you. I won't leave your side.' And she sat right there with me, held my hand, and didn't leave my bedside during the entire ER visit."
Janet's emergency room physician, Jeff Bleazard, MD, has a typically friendly and joking demeanor, so Janet knew it was serious when she saw the look on his face as he entered the room.
Janet says, "Dr. Bleazard looked carefully at me and said, 'You know that cardiology appointment you had for your arrhythmia Friday? That's getting moved up to now — I'm sending you to Dixie Regional.' I began to protest; I said, 'You have to be joking,' but I was stopped by his unusually somber face as he said: 'Janet, I wish I were.'"
She stayed the night at Dixie Regional and by the next morning, the care team had determined she wasn't having a heart attack. Instead she had an allergic reaction to a medication that mimicked a heart attack.
"I wouldn't have wanted this to happen anywhere else," says Janet. "I got the same kind of loving, personal care like I would have from family. My children already lost their dad, who passed away five years ago from cancer, and I didn't want them to lose another parent. I'm so grateful to work among the best."
"It was this unusual pain under my armpits, like I'd been hanging onto something," says Lisa, who's an infusion patient service representative. "I could barely lift my arms up. I took a shower, got dressed, and told myself, 'Well, if there really is a problem, the best place for me to be is at the hospital!'"
Lisa says she, too, didn't feel like herself, and when her friend, infusion nurse Michelle Rees, RN, said her face was unusually red and she wanted to take her blood pressure, Lisa put up a small fight. "But it ended up that my blood pressure read 193 over 170, which is stroke-level," says Lisa. "Another coworker, Heather Hansen, put me in a wheelchair as I fought her. I was grateful for their help, but I was also angry. I was thinking, 'I take care of people, I don't want to be the patient.'"
Lisa says she was very scared, and since she's only 46, heart issues were entirely new territory. "I was loaded up into the ambulance and it was kind of scary as my blood pressure would go up to as high as 200. I was praying and said, 'Lord, give me a sign I'll be OK.' And as I looked out the back ambulance window, a mother and a son were behind us, and I could clearly see their faces. They were both looking at me and had their hands together praying for me. I felt so strongly that was a sign I was being watched out for, and even though I was terrified, I'd be OK."
Lisa was also taken to Dixie Regional's Cardiovascular Unit, where the team initially thought she may need a stent put into her heart. But after an examination in the hospital's Cath Lab, they changed their minds.
"The doctor said my heart was as healthy as a 20-year-old one," says Lisa. "The cause is believed to be the stress of moving to a new house the day before that set what mimicked a heart attack into motion."
When Lisa went back to work, Janet learned about her episode, and the two laughed at the coincidental similarities between them — their relative closeness in age, coming to work with symptoms, coworkers who encouraged them to get care, their soaring blood pressure, seeing the same ER doctor, and riding the ambulance to Dixie. Not to mention they both were thought to have initially had heart attacks, but both ended up being OK.
"Going through something like this is a healthy wakeup call for sure, to eat better, exercise, and take care of ourselves," says Janet.
"I've lost 20 pounds and I'm cutting junky food out of my diet," says Lisa. "We both lived well before, but we're living even better now."
The two recently went to a Trace Adkins concert together in Cedar City to celebrate their similar experiences and their similar clean bill of health. "We take absolutely nothing for granted," says Janet. "Life is meant to be enjoyed and have fun, and it's a wonderful thing when you have such great people around you who really do care about you and inspire you to do and be your very best."