She fought for her life for five days and remembers only two voices
Sedated on life support, she spent nearly every hour writing notes to her care team, then forgot it all except the voices of two nurses.
The Rich Roll Podcast · Olympic Medalist Jenny Simpson On Her Sudden Cardiac Arrest After A Race & The Journey Back To HealthIn the intensive care unit, a nurse went to find a whiteboard. The woman in the bed could not talk around her breathing tube, and a balloon pump was pumping her heart for her. But she was awake, animated, and insistent on helping her doctors save her own life.
The patient was Jenny Simpson, the Olympic medalist runner. She was not in an induced coma. She was heavily sedated, on life support, and, to everyone in the room, fully in the fight.
Simpson remembers almost nothing from that Tuesday until June 21st, five full days, except the voices of two nurses. Her husband later told her that for close to 22 hours a day, she was writing on the whiteboard, asking where she was, who her doctors were, and how she could help, and Simpson said she kept telling the staff "they were doing an amazing job."
She said the drugs kept her from forming memories, so about every 30 minutes her memory reset. Her husband called her surprisingly consistent, going through the same loop every 30 or 40 minutes. The nurses kept telling her, "You're an athlete, rest is good for you," but she wanted to stay in it with everybody.
Her husband, her parents, and close colleagues coached her through those loops. After she had improved enough to leave the ICU for a step-down room, two of her ICU nurses, Claire and Dwight, came to visit. When they started speaking, she knew them instantly by sound. She told Claire, "You made me feel so safe." Claire started crying, and said that was exactly what Simpson had written to her on the whiteboard.
Simpson said their voices "met me in a really, really dark place" and will be "part of my, like, spiritual belief and life forever."
Questions people ask
How could she be awake and writing if she was on life support?
Life support in the ICU does not always mean unconsciousness. Patients can have a breathing tube and heart support while sedated but arousable, especially when sedation is lightened for checks, and they can gesture or write even if they cannot speak.
What does a balloon pump do?
An intra-aortic balloon pump is a temporary heart support device threaded into the large artery leaving the heart. It inflates and deflates in time with the heartbeat to help push blood to the body and reduce the work the weakened heart must do.
Why does heavy sedation erase memory?
Many ICU sedatives interfere with the brain process that turns short term experience into lasting memory. A person can appear awake, talk, and act with purpose at the time, then lose the whole period because the memories were never stored.