When you think about being a teenager, what are the things that come to mind? For me, it’s starting high school. Starting to express myself more, going to my first dance and going to sporting events with friends.

For me personally, it was getting my braces taken off and getting contact lenses for my eyes. It was like I was starting with a blank slate for high school. I don’t think about the possibility of having a heart attack.

That’s exactly what happened to one girl when she was 14. Ceirra Moss survived a heart attack at that age, and the night before, she had gone to a school dance and had a great time; the next morning, she struggled to get dressed.

Once she realized she couldn’t put a shirt on, she tried to get to her parents’ bedroom for help. She made it halfway down the hallway and blacked out, she came to about a minute later.

“I realized I had blacked out,” she said. “At that point, I had a really hard time breathing, and it almost felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. My mom was able to hear my small whisper of ‘mom’ … and she could hear me all the way downstairs across the house.”

Her dad is a pharmacist, and he noticed instantly that the color of her face was turning green. He knew then it was a dire emergency, and he was able to get her to the hospital in record time.

“Something didn’t feel right… and I had pain that was going from my elbow to my shoulder,” Ceirra shared.

“And if you’ve ever looked up symptoms of women with heart attacks, that’s one of the main symptoms.”

The original doctor that diagnosed her told them that she had teenage anxiety and was about to send her home. He then sent her to a children’s hospital. Hours of testing later, she was going into emergency surgery.

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And she says the most memorable thing they did to help calm her was to ask what flavor of anesthesia she wanted.

When she did wake up, she could see her sister in the corner of her hospital room, and she was sobbing.

When she asked her sister why she was in tears, her sister informed her that she had suffered from a heart attack.

She couldn’t believe what her sister was telling her, and she instantly wanted to deny it.

“My heart attack was caused by a blood clot that formed somewhere in my body,” she continued.

“Which I had no idea I had any sort of blood clotting disorder. And I had a congenital heart defect, a hole in my heart. So that blood clot found its way into the whole in my heart, got to my coronary artery, and got lodged in there, which caused my heart attack.”

She remembers, thinking back to the night before, that her heart was thumping so hard at the winter formal. Luckily, the doctors were able to close the hole in her heart with a small mesh piece.

You would hope this is where this story ends, but years later, the side effects of that heart attack caused more health issues for her, and she had to advocate for herself when the doctors told her she was fine.

It was the summer of 2020 when Covid first started, and she felt like her life didn’t feel right to her. Now you might assume it was because of the lockdown and everything that was happening in the world at that time, but it wasn’t.

She went to the cardiologist because her quality of life was getting worse, and she was struggling to breathe from the tiniest bit of exertion. The doctors kind of dismissed her when the EKG came back normal. She knew something was wrong, so she advocated for herself and asked for an echocardiogram to be done. She was twenty at this point.

It took about 6 weeks after that to get the results back, and it was then the doctors told her that she was experiencing severe regurgitation of her mitral valve.

“And I didn’t really know what that meant,” she said. “When they gave me the results, they said we’ll come back and check on this 6 months down the road. And at that point, I knew I was on their back burner.”

“So I found a doctor of my own and for a second opinion. And the second I got to this new doctor’s office he got the surgeon on the phone immediately. So I had my open heart surgery in February 2021.”

All of this was happening, and she shared that it felt like her world was falling apart. Throughout this whole experience, 7 years after her initial heart attack, she never stops advocating for herself because she knew that something was wrong. And in doing so she got the life-saving surgery she needed.

@officiallifetimetv

At just 14-years-old, Ceirra Moss survived a heart-attack. Thank you Ceirra for sharing your story with us and helping raise awareness about heart health. ?? #DontSkipABeat @americanheartassociation @ceirraz

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