T E X A R K A N A M A G A Z I N E
BY TERRI GRAVITT PHOTOS BY MATT CORNEL IUS The Beat Goes On
Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day. It pumps about one and a half gallons of blood every minute. Over the course of a day, that adds up to over 2,000 gallons. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body, enough to go around the world twice. The average heart rate of a woman is about eight beats per minute faster than a man’s heart. It is small, about the size of a fist. The right side of your heart pumps blood into your lungs. The left side of your heart pumps blood back through your body. These are the facts about our heart that we simply take for granted. In fact, unless we find out at birth or at a doctor’s visit as we age that we have a defect or a hereditary heart condition, most of us go about our lives believing our heart is doing what it was created to do, thinking little about it. Unfortunately, though, the heart cannot always be trusted, and it takes a traumatic event to wake us up to the fact that something is indeed very wrong. This is exactly what happened to Christie Firth. Firth was born in Rock Island, Illinois, and grew up in Bettendorf, Iowa, the daughter of Andrea and John Bain. She was very active in high school sports and activities and later got her bachelor’s degree in business management and marketing from St. Ambrose University. Firth worked at the Rock Island Arsenal for a couple of different contracting companies before finding a job opportunity to work overseas in Kuwait for Honeywell. While in Kuwait, she met her husband, Brian, who is from New Boston, Texas. After being laid off from Honeywell, the couple moved back to the United States and settled in Simms, Texas, and had two children, Natalie (10) and Westin (2).
On June 11, 2019, when Firth was just 29 years old, she was going about her day like any other, working at Red River Credit Union in Hooks, when she suddenly collapsed and went into cardiac arrest. Officer Michael Wade, a Red River Army Depot police officer, was on patrol and was flagged down by Firth’s supervisor for an emergency medical situation. Officer Wade immediately called for assistance and heroically began performing CPR on Firth until paramedics arrived at the scene. Wade’s quick action and life-saving efforts undoubtedly saved Firth’s life. As she was transported to the hospital unresponsive, the doctors put her into a medically induced coma so they could figure out what was happening. After many tests, Dr. Kevin Hayes and Dr. Gregory White of CHRISTUS St. Michael discovered she had a birth defect that had never been detected. It was not hereditary and no other family members before her had experienced anything like it. Instead of receiving fresh, oxygenated blood to her heart first, which is normal, her blood was entering her heart after circulating throughout her body. It had functioned incorrectly like this for her entire 29 years. The doctors immediately let her know she would require heart surgery to repair the defect. She was sent by medical plane to the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, for surgery. She was blessed to find her surgeon, Dr. Hani Najm, who performs this type of surgery regularly on children from all over the world who come to the Cleveland Clinic for his expertise. After surgery, Firth had to stay in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (ICU) instead of an adult ICU because most people with her condition do not live beyond their teens. Firth’s recovery was difficult. It took months to get her medications correct. It was a balancing act and Firth ended up back in the hospital for a brief stay. When she was able to go back home, Firth found the most heartbreaking part of her recovery to be
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