MINERSVILLE, Pa. – “I had no pulse. And I was slumped over in the chair,” 28-year-old Shai Gray said, as she recounted when her heart suddenly stopped last September.
Luckily the Schuylkill County woman was in the ER at St. Luke’s Minersville Campus as her son was being treated for a dog bite.
“I woke up when they were doing the compressions and shocking me on the table. And I remember them telling me we got her back,” she recalled.
The mother of six suffered Broken Heart Syndrome.
“If she would have been at her house would she be alive today?” I asked Gerald Coleman, the ER doctor who brought Gray back to life.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
Dr. Coleman says she turned blue. Broken Heart Syndrome happens when a rush of stress hormones is released in the body. It overwhelms the heart and stops it beating, which can mask itself as a heart attack.
“We see this sometimes in …elderly patients that have been having lifelong partners for 50-60 years, one partner passes. They don’t really know what to do with themselves and all of a sudden, they pass a couple months later, and they I always say they die from a broken heart,” he said.
A 28-year-old victim is rare.
Shai says thoughts of her grandmother’s recent death and the death of her 5-month-old son Mason in 2017, both in that same ER, as well as her son’s dog bite, were too much to take.
Gray says listen to your body. Shortness of breath and chest pains are indicators of something being wrong. He adds if something feels off, don’t hesitate to go to the hospital.
Ironically, Gray did a college research paper on Broken Heart Syndrome and is concerned it could happen to her again.
“I don’t want to leave my children. My husband, I could care less he could just fend for himself,” she chuckled. “But my kids, I don’t want to leave them.”
Gray says she is going to therapy to learn how to manage her stress.
