- The hardest part, by far for me, was my son.
Here he was, on the other side of the world in Tokyo,
and after he had just seen me jumping around, you know,
flipping people, doing Krav Maga,
a few days later to get a phone call from his mother
saying, "I'm in the hospital;
I promise you I'm going to make it,
but you have to get on the next plane home right now."
My son Oliver and I are very close,
but I do know it's good to separate,
and for him to be independent.
So, as we reached an age, I think it was 11 or 12,
where it was appropriate for him to walk into town by himself,
I, still being a nervous mother,
decided some self-defense training would be a good idea,
and as luck would have it, this young man had come in
who's written some books on Krav Maga,
and he was willing to do some training for the synagogue.
So, it became a fun family sport.
So, I really had no idea what was going on.
The most that I thought
it was some type of respiratory ailment.
You know, I'd had a slight cough, I was tired.
You know, obviously busy, maybe a little stress.
Being a busy person, you just don't take the time out.
You never take the time to feel sick
or think that it might be something worse.
My parents are 94 years old.
Nobody has an issue, so it just didn't occur to me
that this could be a heart problem.
The cardiologist at the first hospital that I went to
which was the community-based hospital,
and not prepared for this kind of heart event,
recommended that I go to Penn, and I knew the reputation
and said, great, that's where we're going.
- So, Kim came to us,
having been diagnosed at another hospital
with new onset of shortness of breath
and cardiac dysfunction.
An echocardiogram had shown that her left ventricle,
the pumping chamber of the heart,
was not working very well.
We looked at her electrocardiogram
and it showed a lot of extraventricular activity,
suggesting that there was something very active
going on with her heart, and we were concerned
that she represented and may have had
a relatively rare form of inflammation of the heart
called giant cell myocarditis.
It's a fairly unusual diagnosis.
Here at Penn, as a tertiary care center,
we do see several cases a year,
but nonetheless, it's relatively rare.
We called together an emergency meeting
of the cardiac transplant team which involved social workers,
physicians, nurses, and many others,
and agreed that she should be listed
for urgent cardiac transplantation.
- It's a little surreal to hear, you know,
oh, here's an inhaler on one day,
and the next day, you need a heart.
The decisiveness and the swiftness of the diagnosis,
the fact that they could come up with a plan immediately,
it was workable,
and the fact that they were ready to execute it,
gave me extraordinary confidence.
- When we shared with her the diagnosis
and told her that the most appropriate treatment
was cardiac transplant, she didn't flinch.
She was all in,
and I think this helped give us the confidence
that Kim was a good candidate for heart transplant
and would have a good outcome.
- Even now I do it. I stop to take a breath.
It feels so good, and I realize I felt so bad,
but I just didn't know it.
DR. DANIEL KOLANSKY: Kim has been a very successful
mother and businesswoman,
and has made a lot of contributions in her community,
and it was very important to her
that she get back to full strength
and to be able to fully engage in all of her activities.
And from everything we've seen, she has recovered remarkably
and is back to doing all of those activities
that make her who she is.
- Sixty days to the day of being taken in a gurney down to Penn,
I was leading our board meeting at our hospital.
I made it my personal goal to be able to walk into that room
in heels [chuckles] and pearls [chuckles].
I had a vision of what I wanted to be able to do.
These are angels who take care of you,
and I can't emphasize enough
how much this team came together.
Everybody from, you know,
the people at the door in the red coats
to the head of surgery and everyone in-between
is committed to your health and making sure you thrive.
I'm a person that never settles
and I knew that I needed the best,
I needed something extraordinary to get through this.
Penn saved my life,
and I want as many people to know that as possible.