Following her heart: Basketball player recovering from heart surgery
Thanksgiving morning, Anne-Marie Torp woke up with the right side of her body completely numb.
Looking at her bed, she could see the covers moving, but couldn’t feel her arm under the covers.
“I woke up with it,” Torp said. “My covers were moving because I was moving my body, but I didn’t have any recollection of a hand being there. I reached down and felt something really cold and clammy so I thought someone put a fake hand down there.”
Torp said she then jumped out of bed and looked under the covers, but there was nothing there. But when she looked at her arm, it was just hanging at her side.
“I ran into my roommate [Beth Hodge’s] room and I was like ‘I think I’m paralyzed,'” she said.
Two CAT scans and an MRI revealed she had suffered a stroke, set on by a condition called patent foramen ovale (PFO) – a hole in her heart.
Since Torp was about 10 years old, she has had migraines. For the most part, they were never too bad, she’d never had to go to the hospital because of them. But the migraines were frequent and in November of 2004 they got worse.
“In November I had three [migraines],” she said. “Normally I have two a month. All three times I had to go to the hospital. We were wondering what was up.”
After her Thanksgiving day stroke, the doctors knew something had to be done. She’d had a minor blood clot in her leg, something that normally wouldn’t have been a problem. But it had traveled up through the hole in her heart and had caused the stroke.
“They put me on blood thinners and told me they had to get it closed because there was a chance I could have another stroke,” she said.
So, the day after Thanksgiving, Torp found out she would be having heart surgery.
At first, Torp said she was scared because she didn’t know how the doctors were going to do the surgery. She was worried that it would have to be an open heart surgery to fix the defect in her heart.
PFO is a fairly common heart problem. About one in every five people has the defect, but, according to the Barnes Jewish Hospital Web site, most people with the hole live well into adulthood without any “significant” symptoms.
“I was the youngest patient for all the doctors,” the 20-year-old Torp said. “They’ve never seen anybody my age that has this problem.”
She said that for most people with PFO, it’s like it isn’t there. Their blood will flow normally and they will rarely have problems.
But Torp was a “rare case” because, the doctors believe, the red shirt member of the Utah State women’s basketball team was so active. Her blood flows back and forth in her heart, instead of going through it.
“I was so active that it aggravated it. I had so many problems this year with health and they [the doctors] think all my health problems were directed at that,” she said.
On Dec. 9, Torp went in for her surgery.
“It definitely was scary going into surgery because I had a bunch of tests done the week before surgery and they weren’t fun so I was thinking it was going to be a lot worse, which it was,” she said. “It wasn’t a fun surgery.”
Torp said she was supposed to be unconscious during the surgery, but the anesthesia the doctors used wasn’t working. She said the doctors were asking her if she used drugs because she was so immune to the anesthetic. She told them she didn’t and stayed awake for the three hour surgery – asking for pain medication every 10 minutes.
Ten years ago, open heart surgery was the only option for PFO patients who had suffered a stroke. But with the technology advancements, Torp was able to avoid that. Instead, she watched a screen as the doctors fixed the hole in her heart by going through an atery in her leg.
“I was watching the whole surgery being done on the screen,” she said. “I’d see them slip or something and all of a sudden my heart would skip a beat. That was kind of scary. Or they would poke something and all of a sudden I would have a chest pain and couldn’t breathe.
“I kind of panicked during the whole thing. I was crying the whole time.”
Before the surgery, the doctors told her if something went wrong during the procedure, they would have to revert to open heart surgery.
“I was pretty much convinced during the whole thing that I’d have open heart surgery after that,” she said.
Despite the painful three hours, Torp is fine now and recuperating.
She hopes that rather than keeping her from doing everything she did before the surgery, it will actually allow her to do more because the doctors believe her migraines will stop.
“I feel pretty fine for the most part. I can feel pains in my heart, kind of, but that’s about it.”
She said she asked the doctor, since the defect was something she’d lived with all her life, if she would be able to do more things than before, like dunking the ball.
He wasn’t sure.
-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu