Sheri's Heart: A Road to Repair and Recovery

Hi, All. My name is Candace Dawson and I have started this fundraiser to help cover medical and living expenses while my mom, Sheri Dawson, will be resting and hopefully on the road to recovery soon. She will be needing open heart surgery in the very near future to repair her Mitral valve.

On Thursday, October 27th, 2022, my mom was having a very hard time breathing. She had had a cold for about a week and a half and it had seemed to be getting better. About 2 days before this, she had visited Urgentcare, as her primary couldn't get her in quick enough, and Urgentcare found nothing and prescribed Sheri an inhaler. Her chest xray was clear and her vitals were stable. Back to October 27th, paramedics were called to the house around 8pm, vitals were checked and everything came back clear. Fast forward to Friday morning, October 28th, around 4am. Paramedics were called again and were now rushing my mom to the hospital as she could not breath at all. She lost consciousness in the ambulance and doesn't remember much. She was taken to Albany Medical Center where she was immediately intubated and sedated with fentanyl. My mom was then moved to the MICU. Fluid was discovered in her lungs and she immediately needed a chest tube. An entire LITER of fluid came out of her right lung. At this point, the doctors weren't sure what was happening. They were doing multiple lab tests every couple hours. She had another chest xray, ekg, echocardiogram and many other procedures to look for a cause.

To make this long story a bit shorter, the doctors discovered that there was a problem with my mom's heart. She was in heart failure... A "cord" that helps open and close her Mitral valve in her heart had broken, causing it to swing back and forth. This caused a back flow of blood. She was diagnosed with Mitral Valve regurgitation. After an entire week in Albany Medical Center, figuring out medications, doing more imaging, including a cardiac catheterization, it was determined that she needed surgery to hopefully repair the valve. She was eventually discharged from AMC on November 3rd. She then had to follow up with her Cardiologist, her Cardiothoracic surgeon, as well as her primary doctor.

A date has been scheduled for the surgery.

January 17th, 2023

This is pending as she may need it sooner.

Since her diagnosis, My mom, Sheri, has spent another restless night at AMC as she was in supraventricular tachycardia on November 29th, 2022. Her heart was racing in the 200s and was not coming down. She was transported again by ambulance and spent the night in the Emergency Room waiting on a bed that would never come. It took doctors about 2 hours to get Sheri stabilized.

She will need to rest a lot over the foreseen future, but has stressed that her and my dad are very worried about their finances with my mom needing to be out of work and my dad needing to take time off to help care for her.

If you have taken the time to read my mom's story, I'd like to thank you so much! Any little bit will help alleviate stress that her, nor my father, should be worrying about at this time.