CityView Magazine

CityViewNC.com | 35 asked to come over. "EMS stays busy. I didn't feel like I was having an emergency, so I didn't want to go in. I thought they'd just tell me reflux or anxiety. My friend Leslie finally convinced me to call for an EKG," says Royal-Smith. "As soon as the EKG was done at my house, I looked at the monitor and saw the STEMI. I look at EKGs all day long at my job. It's what I do for a living." She says the STEMI, which stands for ST- elevation myocardial infarction, indicated she was having a heart attack. She spent three days in the intensive care unit and a total of five days in the hospital. Royal-Smith went about her life, lost some weight and worked on decreasing stress. "I was doing all of the things that I was supposed to do, and I thought everything was well up until it wasn't," says Royal-Smith. In November 2022, Royal-Smith was helping her daughter get ready for her homecoming dance at school before she and her husband went out to dinner. It had been an easy and fun day. "Literally the most stressful thing I had done that day was go to Wal-Mart," says Royal-Smith with a laugh. When her daughter came home, Royal- Smith was reading on her tablet while sitting next to her husband on the sofa. She stayed downstairs to read a few more chapters, enjoying the quiet before heading to bed. As she turned off her phone and started to go to sleep, a pain developed in her chest that radiated to her right shoulder and into her back. Her husband woke up from the bathroom light and found his wife sweating from the pain. "I told him to call 911 because something was not right. Because of my symptoms, I knew I was having another heart attack. ere was no question in my mind," says Royal-Smith. Her next few minutes were restless. She moved from the couch to the floor back to the couch. Her husband, while on the phone with 911, asked her if she had taken aspirin. "Aspirin was the furthest thing from my mind at that time even though it is one of our first-line medications when you are having a heart attack," said Royal-Smith. At that moment, she looked at her husband and told him that the ambulance needed to get to her immediately. "I had that sense of impending doom. I have been a nurse for 23 years, and I have seen patients who have had it, impending doom, but to experience it myself was terrifying," says Royal-Smith. She remembers firefighters coming to the house and medics coming in with flashes of light and a bustle of movement around her. "When they did the EKG, it showed another STEMI," says Royal-Smith. "It was four minutes — four minutes — from the time the paramedics got to my living room until I went into full cardiac arrest. If we had waited to call 911, there would have been a very different outcome." She was discharged aer five days in the hospital wearing a life vest, which served as an external defibrillator in case she went into cardiac arrest. From there, she worked to keep her heart rate, blood pressure and stress level down. Aer several months of rest, she regained her confidence through Cape Fear Valley Cardiac Rehabilitation. "Cardiac rehab was amazing. I was incredibly anxious about doing anything that got my heart rate up and terrified going in, but it was all reassuring. e team constantly monitors everyone while you exercise," says Royal-Smith. e likelihood of another spontaneous coronary artery dissection is almost nil, she says, which has given her reason to live life to the fullest. Her daughter, Julie, just graduated from Cape Fear High School, and the family is celebrating with a trip to Hawaii. Royal-Smith knows from her 23-year career at Cape Fear Valley Health that early symptom recognition can save lives. "When you are talking about the heart muscle, time is the muscle. Know the risk factors, recognize the symptoms and get help as soon as possible," says Royal-Smith. "When you are talking about the heart muscle, time is the muscle. Know the risk factors, recognize the symptoms and get help as soon as possible," says Sommer Royal-Smith. Royal-Smith and her husband, Bobby. Contributed photo

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