Positivity: ‘Miracle’ saves woman from deadly heart ailment
From Charleston, West Virginia:
Tuesday September 23, 2008
No one can really explain how 33-year-old Marianne Cook survived all she did - a fist-sized tumor on her heart and blood clots that were as long as pencils.
The fact that she’s still alive represents such long odds that she was featured recently on an ABC News series on medical miracles. The headline at the ABC site still trumpets: “Woman Survives Killer Blood Clots; Recovery Baffles Doctors.”
It all started when Cook, a single mother, went to take a hot bath before planning to spend time with a friend last November. After inserting the plug, she suddenly became dizzy and passed out in the tub.
The phone rang in her Beckley apartment but no one picked up.
It was her friend, who even came over to check on her but the door was locked.
“A few hours later, I woke up and my baby was crying,” Cook somberly recalls. “The water was so cold. God gave me the strength to get out of the bathtub and make it to the bedroom floor.”
She passed out again.
No one found her and her son, Jalen, who was 2 at the time, until 20 hours later. A maintenance man was following up on a call from Cook’s downstairs neighbor, who complained that water was leaking from her apartment.
Cook was found drenched in cold water and with scratches on her legs, apparently from Jalen trying to awaken her.
Family, friends and church members in Cook’s former hometown of Arnett, Boone County, are calling her recovery a medical miracle.
She was transported to Raleigh General Hospital and placed on life support.
Her mother, Wilma, was putting on mascara and getting ready to take her granddaughter shopping when she received the phone call.
Wilma immediately rushed to the hospital and called her church friends for prayers.
“All I could see was purple,” the mother said. “Her legs were purple. It made me sick to my stomach to see her on life support, bloated and a terrible color.”
Doctors at Raleigh General weren’t holding hope for Marianne. They believed her chances were so slim that they repeatedly asked her parents to sign a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order to take her off life support.
Her parents were told she’d be a “vegetable” for the rest of her life, if she woke up at all, and compared her brain to cottage cheese.
“I told them ‘No,’ ” Wilma recounted. “‘She’s only 32 years old and has two little boys. I’m not going to do it.’ ”
Marianne’s other son, Levi, is 11.
Marianne was then airlifted to Cabell Huntington Hospital, the only hospital out of 10 contacted that agreed to take her.
Tests there revealed she suffered a massive stroke, and that a fist-sized tumor inside her heart was causing clots throughout her body.
But doctors there could not perform surgery, so the hunt for another hospital commenced.
Three days had passed since her stroke, and the Cleveland Clinic braced to help her.
She desperately needed open-heart surgery, though doctors admitted her chances of survival were slim.
“I went in to kiss her before surgery,” Wilma said. “I literally felt that the ordeal was lifted off my shoulders. I knew everything was going to be OK.”
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