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Sondra Bemesderfer, 53, felt fine the day she had an almost fatal heart attack.
It was out of the blue with no symptoms like chest or arm pain normally associated with heart issues.
“I had gone all day at work feeling fine,” Bemesderfer said. “My best friend who I worked with and I drove through Starbucks after work like we did every day … and when we got on All-American, I started yawning,” Bemesderfer said. “I thought it was odd that I was tired.”
After she got home, she had planned to take her dogs to Starbucks for a pup cup. But that’s when she started feeling off.
“I felt funny and couldn’t get a breath, a full breath,” Bemesderfer said.
She called her son, who worked as a trauma nurse and asked about Covid-19.
“I was sure I was coming down with something respiratory like bronchitis or pneumonia,” Bemesderfer said. “I took a COVID test and it was negative.”
She went into the laundry room to get into more casual clothes and then couldn’t make it further than the bathroom in her hall when she started gasping for breath.
“I yelled at my husband to call 911,” Bemesderfer said. “Something was wrong.”
She pushed the panic button on their security system so an ambulance would be automatically dispatched.
“At that point, it was like I was trying to breathe through a cracked straw,” Bemesderfer said. “After the paramedics got there, they put the CPAP mask on me and I could breathe. I felt fine again. I even offered to walk to the ambulance.”
She said the paramedics worked quickly to get her out of the house and to the hospital.
“My son who drives a sports car could not keep up with the ambulance,” Bemesderfer said. “I still didn’t have any pain, but my blood pressure was 260/170 and my oxygen level was 62. I was nauseated, which I assumed was due to my lack of oxygen.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, a healthy level of oxygen is between 75 and 100 and blood pressure over 180/120 is considered a crisis, needing emergency medical help. Bemesderfer was well over those healthy and in-range numbers.
Her son arrived when the paramedics did and immediately deduced that she was having a STEMI heart attack, according to Bemesderfer. A STEMI, or ST-elevation myocardial infarction, is a heart attack caused by a blockage of blood to the heart, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Symptoms include shortness of breath, fatigue and nausea, all of which Bemesderfer was experiencing, although she still did not have any pain. She was confused as to why she was being sent to a cardiac catheterization laboratory, or cath lab, at the hospital and in such a hurry. A cath lab is a hospital room where doctors perform minimally invasive heart procedures.
“It could not have been scripted better though,” Bemesderfer said. “The entire team at Cape Fear Valley was in place when I got there, but it wasn’t until I was on the cath table that I realized this was real. I realized I was having a cardiac event.”
Dr. Mathhar Aldaoud was the cardiologist on call that night and attended to her as part of the team assembled.
“He told me that he was going to go in through my wrist to place the stent and I told him I had to get up to go to the bathroom before I realized it was serious,” Bemesderfer said. “He said time is tissue and he had to get in there. That the longer it takes to get in there, the more heart damage or more could happen.”
Bemesderfer was awake during the procedure in which they placed a stent — a tiny wire mesh tube used to hold open passages in the body to increase blood flow to the heart — and said her mind was racing while the doctor worked as fast as he could.
“I remember thinking that I was just at home, I was just at Starbucks, then I started thinking no one knows how the bills are paid or when they are paid,” Bemesderfer said. “It was an hour from the time at home to where I was on that table and I had just had a normal day at work.”
It turned out she had a pulmonary embolism, where a blood clot had moved from her lung towards her heart and her LAD was 90% blocked. The yawning was the blood clot moving, she said.
The LAD, or the left anterior descending artery, is the largest coronary artery and a blockage of blood flow can cause a heart attack, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
“That blockage in my LAD helped save my life, it gave me time to get to the hospital — I mean God has the ultimate say-so with that,” Bemesderfer said. “The doctor said if I had waited 20 more minutes, I would not have been so lucky.”
She said it was at that moment when she realized she had survived a heart attack and her life had been completely changed in the span of an hour.
The patient care manager at Cape Fear Valley Health Shonda Ray said women do not have typical symptoms and are less likely to have pain in the center of their chest.
“You see TV shows or in the movies where the man grabs his chest and falls to the floor,” Ray, who manages both the Cardiac Surgery ICU and the Cardiac Surgery Progressive Care Unit, said. “It is not like that in real life. In real life, it can be nausea or vomiting, neck, jaw or back pain or even feelings of anxiety. You might be tired.”
She said sometimes a heart attack can even be confused with a panic attack in women.
“You know your body though and when something is wrong, pay attention,” Ray said.
And when the symptoms are all together — chest pain, shortness of breath, back pain or jaw pain — she said to call 911 immediately and to take a low dose aspirin if you have it.
“When you call 911, it activates EMS, the emergency medical system, which gets the cardiac-cath team at the hospital ready to go,” Ray said. “The patient bypasses the lobby and registration so that your patient care starts as soon as possible.”
She said their main goal is to get the blockage open.
“Time is muscle and the more time that goes by can cause heart damage,” Ray said. “Think of it like a blocked pipe.”
With 20 years of experience as a nurse on the cardiac wing, Ray said that there are factors that cannot be controlled, such as genetics and family history of heart attacks. In those cases, she said to make sure you are staying on top of blood work with your regular provider.
But there are ways that women can prevent heart attacks that are in their control, like eating healthy food, keeping stress levels down with meditation or yoga and exercising as a habit.
“Stay away from fat and salt and do not smoke,” Ray said. “The chemicals in cigarettes attack your blood vessels causing blood clots and a buildup of plaque, which cause dangerous blockages and heart attacks.”
Bemesderfer, who has diabetes, said her heart attack was caused primarily by uncontrolled blood sugar.
Since her heart attack in September 2023, her A1C test — which shows how managed a person’s condition is by measuring the percentage of red blood cells that have sugar-coated hemoglobin — has gone from 13.7 to 6.4, putting her in a healthier range. An average below 7.0 is a good blood sugar level for those with diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
She said she now watches everything she eats and has eliminated red meat, fast food or anything greasy from her diet.
She was not the only one who made a change in their life. Her son Paul also made the decision to go to work for Cape Fear Valley Health.
“My son was so impressed with how Cape Fear Valley Health worked so perfectly for me that night that he decided to change hospitals from where he was working as a nurse in the Emergency Department,” Bemesderfer said. “He’s now a rapid response nurse at Cape Fear Valley and just celebrated his first year.”
Bemesderfer, who stopped working after the incident to take care of her health, said that she looks at life “a whole lot differently now.”
“You really realize what is important is family and health and that extra stuff, that rotten fruit, will take care of itself,” Bemesderfer. “Women tend to not slow down enough. We take care of everyone else — our husbands, our children, our friends. We have to take care of ourselves, too.”
The Cape Fear Valley Heart & Vascular Center at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center is located at 1638 Owen Drive in Fayetteville. It is recognized as an IBM Watson Top 50 Heart Hospital and has joint commission certifications for chest pain and AMI (heart attacks), according to Ray.
Further information can be found at capefearvalley.com.
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