Tonja M's Profile

I felt like my heart was beating out of my chest and it was racing and just assumed I had high blood pressure since my mother had a history of it. I went to my primary care office and they sent me to get a stress test with an echocardiogram. The tech who viewed my echo, before getting on the treadmill, identified a mitral valve flail. Two weeks later I was scheduled for a TEE and cardiac cath to get me ready for open heart - and confirmed I had Stage 4 regurgitation and was then scheduled for mitral valve repair. This was definitely a shock at age 46, I had a five-year old kindergartener and didn't have time for this - not to mention the fear of having open heart surgery and informing my new employer of the news. My surgery was a success and the valve was repaired and heart strings that had torn (don't know why) were sewed back up. It has been a long recovery and ended up with SVT (which took about two years to resolve) and hypertension which has recently resolved. However, I still cannot exercise like I could and so hoping to gain some inspiration in just now finding this community. Running and hiking have always been my "mental" therapy but I'm not able to do run nor hike as long or hard as I used to and wondering if I should hold hope that I will be able to or decide to find a new outlet. Seems I've been in this loop for a year now. I was making (slow) progress until about a year ago where I've stayed stagnant since.