Jayne Lanigan: Life is Grand!
I'm the same person I was before the heart attack.Jayne Lanigan, Novi
Jayne Lanigan did everything right. With three children under 14, this stay-at-home mom ate right and enjoyed physical exercise so much that she played in a women's over-30 soccer league.
"I was an active, healthy person," Jayne says. That's why her heart attack was such a shock.
"Before my kids got out of school for the summer, I started jogging as my regular form of exercise," Jayne recalls. "I would walk five minutes then jog five minutes." It was a good routine, and she was building up resistance.
But one morning last fall, the 41-year-old Novi resident's life changed. She waved to her neighbors as she ran by them into a cul-de-sac in their neighborhood. Five minutes later, the neighbors went to find out why they hadn't seen her circle back. They found her sitting on a sidewalk, clutching her chest, unable to get her breath. They called 911.
"I never imagined that this was heart related – not even when I woke up one week later at U of M," Jayne says. Dr. Francis Pagani, surgeon, was at her side explaining that a heart-assisting device called an LVAD (left ventricular assistance device) had been implanted in her chest. It was helping her heart pump.
"When he said the words 'massive heart attack,' I thought he was in the wrong room," recalls Jayne. "When he talked about me being out jogging and the neighbors finding me, I realized it was me he was talking about."
Jayne had been taken to one hospital, then another, and finally transferred to U-M via Survival Flight. At U-M, physicians discovered that Jayne had suffered a heart attack because of a rare congenital heart defect. Regular physicals and even EKGs had failed to find the anomaly, but U-M doctors made the discovery and took swift action to address her acute heart failure. The LVAD, implanted during emergency surgery approved by her husband and led by Dr. Pagani, had saved her life. Nestled inside her abdomen, and powered by a battery pack on her belt, the LVAD quietly took blood in from her major artery, and gave it an extra "push" to get to the rest of her body.
But the heart failure team told her that the device was not the best option for her long-term survival. She would need a heart transplant.
After four weeks in the U-M hospital, Jayne went home to await her chance at a new heart – knowing that many transplant candidates wait years, and some die before a match is found.
But just a few weeks later, on December 5, 2004, Jayne got the phone call that would change her life again. "We never thought a transplant would happen that fast," Jayne says. She had the transplant on December 6 and was home in time for the holidays – one day before her daughter's 14th birthday.
"It's been an amazing past several months," says Jayne. "Life is grand! I feel good. I'm the same person I was before. I just have more medicines to take than I used to."
