{"id":66682,"date":"2022-11-17T09:38:16","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T16:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/?p=66682"},"modified":"2022-12-19T15:07:59","modified_gmt":"2022-12-19T22:07:59","slug":"pulmonary-embolism-at-37-nearly-killed-mom-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/pulmonary-embolism-at-37-nearly-killed-mom-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"A pulmonary embolism nearly killed this single mom of three girls"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>
\"At
At 37, Bethany Liefer had a pulmonary embolism, a serious health issue that is responsible for 50,000 to 200,000 deaths per year in the United States. Photos courtesy of Bethany Liefer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

At age 37, Bethany Liefer was very much alive.<\/p>\n

She excelled in the outdoors, running 15 miles a week and hiking up to 20 miles a week. She had climbed 16 of Colorado\u2019s famed 14ers and reveled in the joy of reaching each summit.<\/p>\n

Without warning, on a random day in June 2021, her heart stopped, and she wasn\u2019t breathing.<\/p>\n

As she lay lifeless on a gurney in the emergency room at UCHealth Memorial Hospital North<\/a>, a team of doctors and nurses swarmed around her. Initially, they could not find a pulse.<\/p>\n

A team of nurses and EMTs began doing chest compressions. Dr. Clinton Fouss<\/a>, an emergency room physician, placed a tube down into her trachea and connected her to a machine that delivered oxygen, to help her breathe.<\/p>\n

Fouss\u2019 message to his team was crystal clear: Keep trying. Don\u2019t give up. Keep going.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Bethany Liefer with her partner and three girls, ages 11, 8 and 6. Liefer, a pulmonary care nurse, nearly died after suffering a pulmonary embolism. She “coded” at UCHealth Memorial Hospital North and thanks her physician, Dr. Clinton Fouss, for not giving up on her.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For five to six minutes, the mother of three girls, now ages 11, 8 and 6, was \u201ccoding,\u2019\u2019 in hospital parlance, meaning her heart had stopped and she wasn\u2019t breathing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never saw the light \u2026,\u2019\u2019 Liefer recalled months later. \u201cAren\u2019t you supposed to go to the white light when you die? I don\u2019t remember any real come to Jesus moment when I died.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Finally, her caregivers detected a faint pulse. Her heart started beating again and once stable enough to be loaded onto a helicopter for a short flight to Memorial Hospital Central<\/a>, she was in the air. At Memorial Central, she went straight to the operating room, where a surgeon performed a six-hour open heart surgery.<\/p>\n

From there, she spent the next nine days in a coma as a ventilator breathed for her in the intensive care unit.\u00a0 Despite being unconscious, she felt her mother\u2019s hand touch her face. She heard her soothing words.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are safe, and you\u2019re going to be OK.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

A seemingly normal Saturday morning in summer<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A week before that fateful Saturday, June 19, 2021, Liefer had been climbing Mount Big Chief, elevation 11,224 feet. Liefer and her friends had reached the trailhead after 2.5 hours on a four-wheel drive road, southwest of Colorado Springs in Teller County. At the summit, it\u2019s 360 degrees of splendor, with views of Pikes Peak, the Spanish Peaks in the distance, the Sangre de Cristo and Sawatch ranges.<\/p>\n

Oddly, Liefer couldn\u2019t make it to the top.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt so bad, but I had never not summited a mountain, not including weather. But I have always been able to finish, I just thought I was being lazy, that I was not working hard enough,\u2019\u2019 she said. \u201cAnd my friends were like, \u2018this is not you.\u2019\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Bethany
Bethany Liefer is thankful to be alive and grateful for her caregivers after she nearly died from a pulmonary embolism at 37. Here, she and her partner, revel in the Colorado mountains.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Feeling fatigued, Liefer went on with her life and a week later was doing yard work at her home in Monument. That morning she\u2019d sent humorous texts to her friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was with my dog that morning, and I was really slow that morning, out of breath, just moving slowly,\u2019\u2019 she said. \u201cAnd then I thought, maybe I\u2019m just being lazy. Maybe I\u2019m just not pushing it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

In time, she could barely breathe. She managed to call 911, and her daughter, then 10 years old, ran for their neighbor and called her grandfather. Her daughters were terrified to see their mother whisked away in an ambulance to Memorial North.<\/p>\n

Her life had forever changed. She had a bilateral pulmonary embolism. Three out of four people who have a pulmonary embolism and require CPR die.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo my heart, my pulmonary artery and my aortic artery, all of that was clotted and then that clot broke free and pushed into my lungs, and that\u2019s when I had real respiratory distress,\u2019\u2019 Liefer said. \u201cIt\u2019s a really, rapid decline, so I am so lucky.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Where the clot originated remains a mystery.<\/p>\n

\u201cClots form in your legs or your abdomen, and so you have a little bit of warning, and it is painful to have a blood clot in your leg or in your abdomen because there are sensory neurons there. And they couldn\u2019t ever find one, they scanned my legs and they scanned my abdomen, and they couldn\u2019t find any source,\u2019\u2019 said Liefer, a pulmonary nurse at Children\u2019s Hospital Colorado.<\/p>\n

\"Bethany
Bethany Liefer enjoys the Colorado sunshine with her partner. She loves to hike, but at 37, she was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism that nearly took that all away.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Liefer\u2019s hematologist told her that a combination of birth control medication, which has a small risk for blood clots, dehydration, being at altitude the week before and stress, could have \u201cpushed me over the edge,\u2019\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, she wonders if the clots had been forming at least a week prior, when she couldn\u2019t make it to the summit of Big Chief.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were 2.5 hours in on a four-wheel drive road, and I would have been dead. That\u2019s what I always think. If it hadn\u2019t happened when I was at my house with medical care at hand\u2019s reach, I would have been dead,\u2019\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

Liefer has no memory of texting her friends that Saturday morning, the helicopter ride, the operating room. She only remembers the sound of her mother\u2019s voice. When she awoke nine days later, it took a few days for her to gather herself.<\/p>\n

\n

What is pulmonary embolism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pulmonary embolism (PE) occurs when a blood clot goes to the lungs and blocks blood flow into one or both lungs. There are many causes for PE including any condition which causes a person\u2019s blood to be prone to clot including the postoperative state, long periods of inactivity, birth control pills or cancer. \u00a0Pulmonary embolism is responsible for 50,000 to 200,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. Acute massive PE has a 25% mortality rate. Someone who requires CPR in the setting of massive PE (as Bethany did) will have a 75% chance of dying.<\/p>\n

When recognized early and treated early, the outcomes are vastly different.\u00a0 Memorial Hospital has an acute PE response team (PERT) to respond to this deadly disease and vastly improve the outcomes for our patients. The team is comprised of emergency department physicians, pulmonary critical care physicians, interventional radiologists and cardiac surgeons.<\/p>\n

Because the treatment algorithm is complex and there are various ways to treat patients based on the severity of the PE, patients benefit from having the input and expertise of all team members in real time. This multidisciplinary effort assures timely diagnosis and treatment of this deadly disease.<\/p>\n

Dr. Peter Walinsky<\/a>, the chief of cardiac surgery at Memorial Hospital and the driving force in the creation of the PERT said: \u201cPatients like Bethany are the reason we instituted the PERT at Memorial Hospital. She was in the highest risk category of PE and received the most aggressive treatment (open heart surgery). In centers without a PERT it is highly unlikely she would have survived.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI woke up, and I was really confused. I had big chest tubes, and I had a tracheotomy, and I had a G-tube (feeding tube), and I was just really confused and frightened. And they slowly filled me in, and I couldn\u2019t see at the time, my vision was severely impaired.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

When Liefer\u2019s heart failed, blood did not reach the occipital part of her brain, which controls eyesight. Despite impaired vision, she was startled after emerging from her coma to see her father and her new boyfriend conversing in her hospital room.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just divorced, and we had been dating three or four months, and I thought, \u2018I\u2019ll just take this really, really slow.\u2019 And he just kind of bullied his way into the ICU, and he met my father for the first time at the foot of my hospital bed. He hugged my dad, who is a stodgy old German man, and I was like, \u2018Woooooooo. Oh my God.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Dr. Fouss, her physician in the emergency room, also visited her twice while she was in the ICU. She said words cannot adequately express her gratitude for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you. Thank you. Thank you,\u2019\u2019 she says.<\/p>\n

Recovery from a bilateral pulmonary embolism in your 30s<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Fouss said Liefer\u2019s recovery from the bilateral pulmonary embolism was the result of teamwork among many people.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe common theme to any great outcome in medicine is the team effort put into the care of the patient,\u2019\u2019 Fouss said. \u201cAs the physician, I\u2019m an extremely small cog in a very large wheel of people who take pride in what they do on a daily basis.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the ED (emergency department) tech, her nurse, advanced practice provider, CT tech to EMS transport and the helicopter pilot, none of what we do would be possible. Without \u2018things\u2019 happening the way they did that day, I don\u2019t believe we would have had the outcome we had. I\u2019m lucky to be surrounded by incredible people on a daily basis.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Liefer knows that in a life-and-death scenario, the actions of all team members matter. Years ago, she had been working in an emergency room in Texas when a physician stopped doing chest compressions on a patient. Liefer wasn\u2019t ready yet to stop those compressions just yet, and the patient died. Fouss and the team kept them going for her, and it worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to hug every person who did compressions \u2013 some nurse, probably an EMT,\u2019\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

She ended up spending more than 20 days in the hospital and then enrolled in outpatient cardiac rehabilitation, which lasted another 8 weeks and gave her the courage to resume her life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s mostly gratitude because it took the team in the ER, it took my surgeon (Dr. Milton Glatterer)<\/a> who worked on me for 6 hours, and it took the ICU nurses. And I think of all of the things that could have gone wrong. \u2026And the rehab people at Memorial Central and then I went to cardiac rehab, which is outpatient. There are probably no fewer than 250 people that touched my trajectory.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Returning to life, nursing and climbing after a pulmonary embolism at age 37<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In the months since her hospitalization, Liefer has returned to work. She uses a giant computer monitor so she can see, and has a phone that talks to her when she receives a text message. She\u2019s completed driver\u2019s training aimed at helping people who have medical challenges and is driving again, though not at night or in inclement weather.<\/p>\n

She says she is a more compassionate nurse who better understands fear in medical situations.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving been a patient and having felt out of control and frightened, I am a much more compassionate nurse, and I have a lot more patience for a little guy that comes in terrified of his flu shot. \u2018You know kid, I get it.\u2019\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Her daughters are doing well, and together, they have run in a few 5K races. On the one-year anniversary of the event, June 19, 2022, Liefer and her boyfriend intended to summit Mt. Sneffels, a Colorado 14er near Ouray, Colorado. The weather held them back, so they headed up the mountain the next day with their dog, a husky.<\/p>\n

Near the summit, there\u2019s a \u201cnotch,\u2019\u2019 that requires people to climb up on all fours. A slip-up there, and a hiker could plunge 500 feet down the side of a rock-face mountain. The dog wanted nothing to do with traversing the notch, so Liefer\u2019s boyfriend stayed with the dog, and she summited the 14er by herself. Triumph.<\/p>\n

Later in the summer, they all took a backpacking trip \u2013 their first — into the wilderness. They carried two tents, a hammock, rations and water. They carried marshmallow fluff for s\u2019mores since fire restrictions prevented the girls from roasting them over an open fire.<\/p>\n

The three sisters stayed up most of the night, keeping the adults in the next tent over from getting any sleep.<\/p>\n

At 2 a.m., Liefer heard her girls giggling and squealing. One of them shouted: \u201cTickle fight!\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  At age 37, Bethany Liefer was very much alive. She excelled in the outdoors, running 15 miles a week and hiking up to 20 miles a week. She had climbed 16 of Colorado\u2019s famed 14ers and reveled in the joy of reaching each summit. Without warning, on a random day in June 2021, her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":66687,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3512,3357,2737],"class_list":["post-66682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-heart-and-vascular-care-cardiovascular","tag-lung-and-respiratory-care-pulmonology","tag-pulmonary-rehabilitation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPulmonary embolism at 37 nearly killed this mom - 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