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As the president of a local insurance agency, an active Hazleton business leader and a golfer, Donna Barna is used to dealing with all kinds of situations. Most don't give her pause. So when she thought she had a bad case of bronchitis in June 2014, she kept working as normal.
"I'm old school," says Barna, now 55. "You always go to work." This despite having a headache, body chills and difficulty breathing.
After work, "I was feeling really terrible, and I kept saying to my husband that I think I should go to the ER (emergency room) and get antibiotics," she says. "I started thinking about my heart, and I remembered hearing that if you take an aspirin and it takes the pain away, you're not likely having a heart attack."
So Barna took an aspirin, started feeling better, and told her husband and son, both named David, she would go to their family doctor the next day.
She headed for bed around 9 p.m., but the symptoms came back, worse than before. Not wanting to bother her husband, who would have to get up for work in the morning, she asked her son, who had just graduated from college, to drive her to the ER. She lives about seven minutes from Lehigh Valley Hospital (LVH)–Hazleton.
'I couldn't scream for help'
When she arrived and started giving her health history – including the fact that both of her parents have heart problems – ER caregivers hooked her up to a heart monitor. "The next thing I remember is hearing something that sounded like a fire alarm," she says. "I could feel myself passing out, and I couldn't scream for help."
The alarm was the heart monitor going off because her heart had stopped beating. In fact, by the time Barna regained consciousness, her heart had stopped for 27 seconds.
"Normal people can have their heart slow moderately at night when they sleep, and we sometimes have pauses of up to five seconds at night," says cardiologist James Sandberg, MD, with LVPG Cardiology. "But pauses of 27 seconds are markedly abnormal."
A quick flight
ER colleagues in Hazleton quickly arranged for a Medevac flight to LVH–Cedar Crest in Allentown. Barna called her husband and was able to see him before the flight left.
Twelve minutes later, the helicopter landed. Barna learned she would have a cardiac catheterization done at 9 a.m. (it was now after 2 a.m.) By the time her husband arrived in the morning, the procedure was over.
"In her case, even though she came in with chest discomfort, she wasn't having a heart attack," Sandberg says. Instead, the fact that her heart stopped – and that she has a slow heartbeat to begin with – meant she needed a pacemaker, which Sandberg implanted later that day.
"A pacemaker sends a stimulus to the heart so it maintains the heart rate and eliminates pauses," Sandberg says. "It is inserted under the skin on the front wall of the chest just under the collarbone.
We've put pacemakers in people as old as 96 and as young as 22."
A '21st century' pacemaker
The pacemaker Barna received is so 21st century that in addition to being MRI-safe (no metal), it can communicate with Sandberg's cardiology team wirelessly through an app on Barna’s smartphone. Similarly, if her cardiology team needs to make adjustments to her pacemaker, they can do it virtually through that same app. Since Barna had the pacemaker inserted, it’s been needed about 10 to 15 percent of the time to regulate her heartbeat. "So 85 to 90 percent of the time her heart is working on its own," Sandberg says.
Now back to a busy schedule including golfing, cooking with her son via Skype and volunteering with the Hazleton Rotary Club, Hazleton Rotary Foundation, Greater Hazleton Library Board of Trustees, CANDO and as the board chair for the Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce, Barna says, "I touch my pacemaker every day. And I wake up with a positive attitude. I realize that in a heartbeat you can be gone, so I live every day to the fullest."