Support for the Strookman Family

Layne will be out of work for a long time and we want to take any stress away that we can. If you feel the want to give, anything is appreciated ❤️

Layne’s story ⬇️

Layne and Bram welcomed their sweet healthy baby boy, Breck, on January 9th. Layne had a very normal delivery and postpartum recovery and had been cleared at 6 weeks to start working out again etc. She felt great up until this past Tuesday morning, February 25th, she felt off in the morning. She had chest pain followed by dizziness and nausea. She took Lily and Finn to school and ended up grabbing their lovely school nurse, and she proceeded to have a heart attack. Luckily the ambulance was there in minutes and got her to Saint Luke’s on the Plaza quickly. Through a series of testing, she was diagnosed with SCAD (Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection) also known as a heart attack. This is very rare but 70% of SCAD patients are healthy women within the first few months of postpartum. This is something that needs so much more awareness, but we will save that for another time.

She was admitted and monitored for a few days at Saint Luke’s and after good looking scans, she was able to head home on Thursday, February 27th as she was so eager and happy to get home to her babies. She honestly felt pretty great all things considered. She physically felt well, but had a bit of anxiety about everything, rightfully so. The doctors did share with Layne that about 15 - 20% of SCAD patients experience another heart attack within the first week after their first one. She was to take it easy and be on the mend in 6 weeks, with some physical therapy in the future.

On the early morning of Friday February 28th, Layne was awake nursing baby Breck and started feeling the same symptoms come on and she knew it was time to quickly call an ambulance. She got to Saint Luke’s and after performing a catheter procedure on her heart again, they said it was much worse this time and she needed emergency bypass surgery.

The surgery started and we were getting updates every 1 - 2 hours. The original plan was a regular bypass but once they opened her up they saw that 2 of her arteries were completely dissected, and a third looked questionable, so it quickly turned into a triple bypass. We sat in the waiting room for what felt like an eternity yesterday, but luckily had baby Breck there as our one slice of happiness on what has now become the worst day of our lives.

When they were nearing the end of surgery, the left side of Layne’s heart didn’t want to cooperate. When you have bypass surgery, they need your EF (Ejection Fraction) level to be at 85% to take you off. The left side of Layne’s heart was at 15% at the end of surgery which indicates heart failure. Hearing this news was a shock to all of us that brought out emotions we had never experienced before.

What we need is for Laynes EF levels to go up significantly, otherwise she will need a heart transplant. The team shared with us that this is the worst case of SCAD they have ever seen. That’s hard to swallow, knowing a few days ago Layne was a happy, healthy mom of 3 with no known heart problems.

Yesterday was a hard day, and we just need to see improvements in Layne’s levels.

Today has been better, as they just took her off the ventilator and she can breathe on her own now - that’s huge! She is on an Impella machine which is keeping her heart pumping. They did just perform an Echo and her EF level is now at 20%, which isn’t great but it’s improvement from 15% so we will take it! We just need it to keep improving.

We’ve met with the heart transplant team to start putting together a plan, in case we do have to. The good news here is that she’s young and healthy and should be close to the top of the list. However, we would rather keep that sweet heart of hers and we are hopeful the next few days we will see more improvement.