Every day of life is a blessing, and Kathy Armstrong counts her blessings twice every day.
You see it in her face.
You hear it in her voice.
She is a woman of strong resolve.
“I’m going to live for all of her days and many years ahead,” Armstrong, 55, was saying Wednesday. “I’ve been sick for 26 years.”
Armstrong is a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter and sister with a grateful heart that once belonged to someone else but now beats within her in what has become a new lease on life.
“Now, she has two birthdays,” husband Chris Armstrong was saying about his wife of 32 years.
Kathy Poole was born the healthy daughter to Bob and Joan Poole on Oct. 4, 1969, in Durham, and again on Dec. 18, 2024, when she underwent heart transplant surgery at Duke University Medical Center for her failing heart.
Her heart journey has been long, accented with emotion, trauma, fear, sleepless nights, hope and prayer dating to Feb. 17, 1998, with the birth of her second child.
“I was sick toward the end of my pregnancy,” said Armstrong, recalling a bout with bronchitis. “It was a couple of months later, and I kept being out of breath and getting dizzy. I went to the doctor. He ordered an echocardiogram just to be safe.”
Cardiologist Dr. Martin Bacon, she says, diagnosed Armstrong with postpartum dilated cardiomyopathy.
“He said, ‘I have to let you know you are at risk of cardiac arrest at any moment,’” she said.
Joan Poole was with her daughter.
“It was very frightening,” she said. “I said, ‘Dr. Bacon, would you start over? This sounds serious. He said, ‘It is serious, she could die.’”
Give it some thought.
Here was a 27-year-old woman learning of a heart condition that, according to the cardiologist, could take her life.
“I don’t think it really hit me,” Armstrong said, ‘I said, ‘What do we need to do?’ I had a new baby. I didn’t have time to dwell on it. They said they would treat it with medicines.”
She went on with life, raising her sons and teaching English at Terry Sanford High School from 2003 to 2019 along with daily medications and a defibrillator in 2009 to give a shock to the heart, she says in the event of irregular heart rates.
“I was doing fine until 2017,” Armstrong said. “I was always short of breath. I would wear out. But I never gave any thought to dying.”
Oct. 30, 2024
A failing heart would reveal itself all the more on Oct. 30, 2024, at the HomeGoods merchandise store at Freedom Park Town Center.
“I was shopping for pillows,” she said. “I was going to a N.C. pilgrimage retreat at Camp Dixie, and I went down.”
A nurse, she says, also was shopping in the store, and quickly rushed to Armstrong.
“I told the nurse I’d had some heart problems,” Armstrong said. “The nurse said, ‘You have to go to the hospital.’”
She later found herself at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center. A day later, Kathy Armstrong was at Duke University Medical Center.
“I was in a stepdown room,” she said. “We talked to the transplant team. They said I was about 60% toward a transplant. So, with medications, I would be going home. We thought I was stable. Three friends — Chris Yeager, Gina Puryear and Leighanne Grice — from Fayetteville came to visit.”
The visit was interrupted, Armstrong says, when she lapsed into ventricular tachycardia.
“Your heartbeat goes really high,” she said. “It feels like your heart is beating out of your throat. V-tach scared me to death.”
The rapid response team, Armstrong says, rushed her to Cardiac ICU.
“I was in critical condition,” she said. “I was in a V-tach storm. There was no blood getting to my extremities. They were cold. Chris and the boys came, and they didn’t think I was going to make it through the night.”
She survived the night.
But Kathy Armstrong was a woman in health peril with a failing heart.
“My heart team decided I needed a heart transplant to live,” she recalls Nov. 5. “I was a little overwhelmed. I feared rejection. I had not educated myself about it. They installed an impella (heart pump) device to make your heart beat. When you are on an impella, you are level two” as a heart transplant candidate.
‘I love you, Chris’
Armstrong says she became a heart transplant candidate on Nov. 22.
“Then” she said, “you just wait.”
Until 4 a.m. on Dec. 18, when Kathy Armstrong learned a healthy heart had arrived, and the decision for surgery was hers.
“It took a second,” she said on her decision. “I thought, if the physicians felt it was good, I was good.”
Dr. Carmelo Milano and the transplant team prepared for what Armstrong says was an almost 12-hour surgery, but not before a husband and wife would hold one another’s hands.
“I love you, Chris,” she told her husband. “He had my hand and said, ‘You’ve got this.’ I was teary-eyed.”
She had one final word before the surgery.
“I said, ‘God, you’ve got this,’” Kathy Armstrong said. “‘It’s all you.’”
‘I was scared’
A waiting room can be a lonely place when someone you love is undergoing surgery. You’ll find yourself thumbing through the pages of magazines, turning your eyes to the second hand on the clock above that doesn’t seem to move, where the minutes and hours seem to stop. You look toward others with loved ones in surgery and wonder to yourself if their anxiety is akin to what you are feeling inside. After a while, there’s only so much coffee you can consume from the vending machines.
You hope.
You pray.
Chris Armstrong was joined by son Hunter Armstrong, daughter-in-law Charlotte Hasty Armstrong and brother-in-law Jason Poole in the waiting room. Son Josh Armstrong, Caroline Hasty, and parents Bob and Joan Poole remained in touch with family members by phone throughout the surgery.
“I was scared,” Chris Armstrong said. “You always have bad thoughts. But the nice thing about Duke is that they text you and say how the surgery is going.”
Around midnight, Kathy Armstrong was a woman with a new heart.
“I felt like I made it,” she said.
A husband offered assurance.
“I love you,” Chris Armstrong, 55, told his wife, “and you did great.”
Chris Armstrong says he believes God heard his prayers.
“I told her the doctors were encouraged,” Chris Armstrong said. “Her pulmonary artery pressure was elevated. They saw blood in one of her tubes. That was a little nerve-wracking.”
The ensuing 24 hours, he learned, would be critical.
Kathy Armstrong was discharged from Duke Medical Center on Jan. 7, returning to her VanStory Hills home with the pink double doors, and with a new lease on life.
She was back at Duke University Medical Center on March 11, where there were more tests on her new heart. A day later came the call about those tests.
“Everything is right where we want you,” she was told. “Heart rejection is zero. Sounds like overall your visit was good.”
Epilogue
Kathy Armstrong doesn’t know her heart donor, but she hopes one day to know.
“You write a letter to Honor Bridge,” she said about the North Carolina organ procurement organization. “You tell them your name and the family has the chance to read it. They say you have to wait six months.”
She counts the days when she can say “Thank you.”
Chris Armstrong shares his wife’s gratitude.
“The happiest day of our life was the saddest day for that family,” he said. “But I would want them to know, ‘Thank you, thank you.’”
This journey of the heart has been long.
“I would love to meet the family of the person,” Kathy Poole Armstrong said. “I want to know what their child or loved one was like. I don’t know if thank you is enough, but their family member gave me life.”
In the dining room of the Armstrong home with the welcoming pink double doors, you’ll find the door hanger that says it all about Kathy Armstrong’s tomorrows to come: “heartstrong 12.18.2024.”
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
We’re in our third year of CityView Today, and so many of you have been with us from day one in our efforts to bring the news of the city, county, community and Cape Fear region each day. We’re here with a purpose — to deliver the news that matters to you.
Bill is certainly a treasure to the community! His writing is always so inspiring and informative.