“You’re just used to going about your mundane days, and all of a sudden, something like this happens,” Adams said. “And I had no memory recall at all of anything that happened in that point in time.”
Adams woke up on Oct. 27 and noticed a pain in his chest. It was something he’d felt before, but said on that day, it was particularly annoying. He went to the Middletown Kettering Health location to get it checked out, and found his troponin, a protein that can indicate muscle damage in the heart, was elevated.
That team chose to keep him overnight at another Kettering Health location, but he began crashing at around 2:30 a.m. A nurse in the room caught it.
“I coded for roughly 40 minutes,” he said. “It was just rounds of Kettering nurses and doctors, doing two-minute rounds of CPR and trying to stabilize me.”
After that, it all went dark, and Adams credits his girlfriend, Mariah Harville, as well as his parents, to fill in the gaps for him after that.
Adams was transferred to the main campus of Kettering Health, admitted to the catheterization lab, which is the cardiac and heart health center, and that team calculated what Adams’s body could handle.
The team put Adams on ECMO, the hospital’s new iron heart.
Dr. Romel Garcia-Montilla, cardiovascular intensive care unit director and ECMO program medical director at Kettering Health Main Campus, said ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine. The machine acts as an artificial heart, taking blood from one side of the heart, removing the CO2, reoxygenating it, and returning it to the other side of the heart, keeping the heart beating
“This gives the heart enough time to recover for surgery, or the care team extra time to determine the cause and best course of action for the patient,” Garcia-Montilla said.
Adams crashed multiple times, with the team needing to do more CPR. The catheterization lab put an Impella, a small heart pump in his heart, within 24 hours.
Adams was on the ECMO for about seven days and was at various Kettering Health locations for 11 days. During that time, a nurse caught a blood clot in his leg, which prevented the team from later having to amputate it.
“God forbid, if I had to go back in time to pick the right people to be in the right place at the right time, I wouldn’t change anything at all,” Adams said.
Everyone took great care of him, he said, calling the catheterization lab the “unsung heroes” of the whole operation.
“They were pretty much responsible for 85% of my stabilization,” he said. “They were ground zero, they’re the ones who found out everything that was wrong.”
Adams was able to meet the team who saved his life Friday and thank them in person. He said meeting them was helpful as his girlfriend had shown him photos of various people who’d taken care of him, but due to the memory loss and being unconscious, he didn’t remember any of them.
“I mean, they are responsible for saving my life,” he said. “So it was a very, very heartfelt reunion.”
The team said Adams’s visit helped them as well.
“When we wake up and come into work, this is exactly what we want to do: Save a life and get people back to feeling better,” said Dr. Niranjan Reedy, interventional cardiologist at Kettering Health. “When we see really, really positive outcomes like Trevor’s, it gives us even more encouragement to keeping doing better and keep doing more for our patients.”
Adams woke up at the Ross Center at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where he spent another month re-learning to walk, brush his teeth and live his life. He was discharged from the hospital on Dec. 2.
“There were days where I’d walk, maybe, like 20, 25 steps,” Adams said. “That would be my exercise for the day.”
Adams said his memory of the previous four months leading up to the cardiac event were gone when he woke up, but some of it has started to come back.
Adams said the team suspects a pinched Vagus nerve may have caused the event. But he said he was consistently working 65 to 70 hours a week and working out five days a week before this happened, and he has some genetic factors the team found while he was in the hospital.
“I would advocate everyone take their health seriously,” Adams said. “Especially after a life-changing event like this.”
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