An MSNBC anchor’s misdiagnosis meant what started as a common cold could have been fatal.
Yasmin Vossoughian told viewers on the air that she had been absent from the show because she was “dealing with a little bit of a health scare.”
“I wasn’t sure what to make of it but as it continued to get worse I started to think something was actually wrong,” she said.
“I didn’t really buy it,” she confessed. “But I was relieved it wasn’t my heart. My body though, was pretty certain not to believe the reflux.”
The next day her “reflux” sent her to the hospital.
“I woke up with severe pains both in my chest and my left shoulder. It was like a tightening in my chest. I took deep breaths that got worse when I was laying flat. I knew enough in that moment that it could mean, could is the key word here, that I was having a heart attack, especially because it was on the left part of my shoulder.”
MSNBC
Speaking about being “a pretty healthy person”, Vossoughian pointed out that she runs seven miles multiple times a week, is a vegetarian, does yoga, is not a smoker and used to drink “occasionally” but no longer can due to her doctor’s orders.
After experiencing the chest pains her husband took her to the emergency room where “the nightmare that has been my January began.”
After multiple nights in the hospital and doctors draining the excessive fluid that surrounded her heart, she was released.
“I bounced out of the hospital. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough with the hopes I was on the mend. But that was not the end.”
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She was taken back to the hospital three days later after she felt “a flutter” in her heart. It was later confirmed she had myocarditis, a condition she described as “inflammation of the actual heart muscle.”
She wondered if “this is it” and said thankfully, it was not. She spent five days in the hospital where she underwent treatment and testing, noting, “it was just the cold that was doing all of this. It had caused all of this inflammation around my heart.”
The anchor said she hopes that she is now “on the other side” and on the road to true recovery, though she will be on medication for the long haul.
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She credited her cardiologist, Dr. Greg Katz, who joined her during the segment.
In part, he explained how a cold could impact one’s heart. “It’s the way your body is responding to the cold. Your immune system, for most of us, takes a couple of days to clear the virus. But for a small proportion of people, they get an overactive immune response.They can have inflammation in lots of different areas.”
source: people.com
