Imagine feeling something rip inside your chest. It was a terrifying moment for Molly Easly.
“It felt like someone was dragging a knife down my abdomen and I could feel like the rush of warm from the blood,” she said. “I knew what was happening, but I also didn’t want to like admit that’s what was happening.”
It was an emergency situation, an aortic dissection.
“If you don’t get a dissection fixed right away, it starts to come apart in the outer layers and that’s a rupture and then you bleed to death and you die,” said Dr. Eric Roselli, Cleveland Clinic chief of adult cardiac surgery and surgical director of the Aorta Center. “Your aorta is the main blood vessel that carries the blood from your heart throughout your body.”
For 25-year-old Easly, it’s believed to be hereditary. Her grandmother and father experienced the same thing.
“When my dad had his dissection that’s when I started being seen more seriously by the Cleveland Clinic because we suspected that the same thing would happen to me,” she said.
Easly was 11 at the time. Roselli performed her father's emergency surgery.
Since she was 18, she’s had several procedures over the years; some emergency, others preventative.
“After my first surgery, I came out of surgery with my nurses telling me that I was a walking miracle and it took a little bit for me to believe that but I know that I am very lucky to be alive and very blessed to be alive,” she said.
Roselli said it’s not as common as coronary artery disease or other conditions. “But there’s a suggestion that it may be as many as 40,000 people a year die of aortic disease in the United States, which is like an under-appreciated epidemic.”
He said they’re learning aortic dissection, which is most often a hereditary condition.
“We talk about lifelong care for aortic disease, which means not only that patient who may need something else, another repeat operation in another part of the aorta later on, but also extending care to all of their family members and making sure we’re figuring out why and how and who else, so we can avoid those emergency situations.”
At one point, Easly spent weeks in the intensive care unit. During testing, doctors also found thyroid cancer. “I was frustrated, I was scared,” she said.
She overcame that diagnosis and graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees during her health challenges. She also got married in October. Easly said her husband also has a condition that affects his aorta.
“That was a huge bonding point for us,” she said.
More surgeries are ahead, but she wants her story to be a light for others.
“The thing I learned through all of this was gratitude had a completely different meaning to me after going through all of this,” Easly said.
