My Why – 2023
My name is Jennifer Davis. I am 46 years old
I am a - Daughter
- Wife
- Mother
- Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgical Physician Assistant
On Saturday, May 20, 2017, I had gotten up, went to yoga in the park in downtown St Pete with my mom. Came back, had lunch and went swimming with my two girls, Ana who was 8 and Hadley who was 5 at the time. We were moving in to our new home with a pool and the girls were insisting I get in a swim with them. I remember jumping in and feeling like the water was too cold for me (remember is was MAY in ST PETE). My husband took a quick picture of all his girls in our new pool and I jumped out to go rest.
I began having a weird pressure deep in my chest. I suffer from heartburn and brushed it off. The discomfort went away. I went to tell my husband that I just wasn’t feeling right and in that moment had a horrible wave of nausea hit me, with it came that pressure in my chest.
My chest pain was intermittent, hard to determine if in fact it was cardiac or indigestion. I needed someone other than myself to evaluate my pain.
In the ER, I began having chest pain that radiated up my neck and into my jaw. The pain even radiated to my left shoulder and down my arm. My husband - having no medical background - asked me to call for the nurse because of the look on my face. I’ll never forget what happened in the next 2 mins.
The nurse came in and saw that I was having a heart attack on the monitor. She called for the rapid response and cath lab team. Within seconds the room was full of more than 20 people. I remember signing my name on a cath consent, taking aspirin and nitroglycerin.
This is when I lost consciousness for a few seconds. When I woke up, I had the ER physician holding my head and people still surrounding the bed working on getting IVs and medications in me. I remember starting to cry and begging the ER MD to help me. I remember saying “I have two young girls. please help me” and then I lost consciousness and coded.
My Girls…
Although they were likely too young to completely understand what happened, they did know that life had changed for us as a family forever. They knew mama could not run and chase them like she used to; they saw me sit on the boat while they all snorkeled and scalloped, when normally I would be the first one in and last one out.
They also know that mama had to travel multiple times in 2017-2018 to see special heart doctors to help fix what was wrong with her heart. Hadley, my then 6 year old is so happy that “we finally got surgery because now mama can start running again soon and race her and we can finally see who is faster”.
Ana my eldest with a heart of gold, holds it all in and is the observant one. She needs to know everything will be ok. She needs her mama to be there for her.
This was my story in from 2018. Since then I have had 3 full body CT scans evaluating my arteries, 2 heart caths because of chest pain and I’m on 4 daily medications to help prevent another SCAD event.
Heart disease does not have a cure. Once affected, the disease, follow up, management and treatment is for life. My journey started at 40 years old. My kids were 6 & 9. At the time of the heart attack in the ER I couldn’t imagine them going through life without ME as their MAMA.
Now they I’m 46 and they are 11 and 14 years old. They don’t fully understand the ins and outs of living with heart disease but they do understand that they are my WHY and that I will do everything I need to do to stay Heart healthy and continue to work helping raise money for AHA. We walk every year. My family raises money and AWARENESS and share our story as much as we can.
To those of you who have donated, thank you, to those of you who can't donate please continue to pray for the survivors and families of those who lost their battle with heart disease.
