A brush with death has brought a new career for former Southeast High School health and physical education teacher Sarah Gaila Morrison.
One year ago, Morrison was so ill she could barely get out of bed.
Today, just eight months after open heart surgery, as a graduate assistant pursuing a master's degree in public health, she is now helping other heart patients prepare and go through the same ordeal she faced.
Looking back, Morrison, who is now 25, can hardly believe how close she came to death.
Her illness began with profound fatigue and night sweats in the fall of 2007.
"My night sweats were so bad, my bed would just be drenched and I would have to change my sheets," said the former star of the Bradenton Christian High School girls volleyball team. "I was tired all of the time, so fatigued, I could barely get through the day."
Morrison's colleagues at a school in Palm Beach, where she was teaching at the time, were worried.
They encouraged her to see a doctor, but after blood tests and exams, no one could tell her what was wrong.
By March, Morrison was so sick she called her mother in Bradenton for help.
"Come home," said her parents, Nan and Jim Morrison, a retired Major League Baseball player who spent 12 years with the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Atlanta Braves. Morrison now manages a Single A affiliate for the Tampa Bay Rays.
But once again, doctors had no answers. Some dismissed her complaints, because they said she didn't look sick. A physician at one of the local hospitals even told Sarah she didn't belong in the ER, because hospitals were for sick people.
But by March 17, Sarah was running temperatures of 103 to 104 degrees at night. She could barely move. She was unable to lie on her back. Breathing was hard.
Alarmed, her mother called Dr. Tom Ganey, a family friend. Ganey told the Morrisons to immediately take Sarah to Blake Medical Center's emergency room. After examining her test results, Ganey spotted an abnormality in her echo cardiogram.
Ganey called in Dr. Allesandro Golino, a Bradenton heart surgeon who found Sarah had endocarditis, an inflammation or infection of the thin membrane that lines the inside of the heart.
The infection was made worse by a mitral valve prolapse, a common heart disorder that occurs when the valve between the heart's upper chamber and the left lower chamber doesn't close properly.
Sarah said her abnormal valve was allowing the blood flow to leak or regurgitate backward into her heart.
"My mitral valve prolapse caused the staph infection to continuously wash through my heart," Sarah said. "Dr. Ganey said that I could have died if it had not been treated. Dr Ganey was my quarterback; he brought in a team of doctors who saved my life."
Golino recommended surgery to replace the leaky valve, but the available options forced Sarah to make a difficult decision.
"They told me I could have a pig's valve, but because of my young age, the operation would have to be repeated in seven or eight years and a new pig's valve implanted," said Sarah. "My second option was a mechanical valve, but that meant I would have to be on coumadin (a blood thinner) the rest of my life."
Never being allowed to go off the blood thinner, also meant Sarah could never have a child.
Sarah's eyes glistened when she thought back to that difficult choice.
"I was just crying when Dr. Golino told me, because I wanted to have children," she said. "That's why I chose the pig valve even if meant going through open heart surgery again."
But when Golino opened Sarah's chest, he found a surprise, according to her mother.
"He said it was like a light was shining down on her mitral valve and he could see that it could be repaired," Nan Morrison said.
Throughout the operation, the Morrisons say they were sustained by a prayer chain that literally stretched from coast to coast.
"The Rays organization was so wonderful," Sarah said. "They gave my Dad all the time he needed to be with me."
But Sarah's problems were not over. Within a few days of her surgery, her chest cavity began to fill up with fluid.
Between the end of March and the first part of May she was admitted to Blake three more times for painful procedures to drain the fluid pushing against her lungs.
Dr. Janine Mylett, a Bradenton lung specialist was called in, as was Dr. Eliot Godofsky and Dr. James DeMaio, infectious disease specialists who oversaw the daily administration of intravenous antibiotics Sarah needed for more than eight weeks.
Sarah says the most painful part of her treatment -- even more painful than the open heart surgery -- was the thoracotomy, a surgical procedure in which Dr. Jim Ganey (Dr. Tom Ganey's brother) made an incision in Sarah's back, spreading her ribs to drain the fluid that had collapsed one of her lungs.
"The infection was so bad it had created a film on my lungs that Dr. Jim had to peel off with his hands, Sarah said.
"My dad watched over me. He made sure everybody who touched me washed their hands first. He decided who could come into my room and when."
She laughed when she remembered the nurses' reaction to her dad. "They wrote 'difficult father' on the little board in my room."
Nan Morrison still shudders when she remembers the months of pain her daughter experienced, how close she came to death.
"It is so hard to watch your daughter go through something like this," she said. "But she had such wonderful care. We heard from so many people who sent cards and gifts, people we never heard from."
Sarah says her brush with death came just when she was seeking focus in her life.
Now a graduate student at the University of Mississippi, Sarah is pursuing a master's degree in public health.
As a graduate assistant, she spends three days a week at Baptist Memorial Hospital near the Ole Miss campus, helping heart patients prepare and recover from procedures just like those she experienced.
"The patients trust me because they know I have gone through what they are going through," she said.
Her new mission in life pleases her parents, they say.
"That was our prayer, that something good would come out of this," Nan Morrison said. "We knew she was going through so much pain; we hoped it was for a purpose." To see more of The Bradenton Herald or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bradenton.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Bradenton Herald, Fla. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
Copyright (C) 2009, The Bradenton Herald, Fla.