Kevin Moore, center, flanked by his wife Chassidy and his cardiologist Hasan Siddiqi, returned to the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit to thank the team who cared for him. Photo by Donn Jones.
Last October, Kevin Moore sat by his father’s side in a hospital room as he died.
Two weeks later, Kevin was in a hospital room himself, fighting for his life.
Kevin was 42, had never been hospitalized, and except for the grief and pain of dealing with his father’s death, nothing unusual had been going on with his health.
Yet here he was at VUMC with an unusual heart condition that had slowed his heart rate to 24 beats per minute and was threatening his life.
“It just came out of the blue,” Kevin said. “Never in a million years did I think I’d be in the hospital for something like this.”
This is the story of a previously healthy, active person suddenly fighting for his life with acute heart failure who — with the intervention of VUMC’s most advanced doctors and devices —recovered and returned to that life.
Doctors are still trying to figure out what happened to Kevin, who had no previously diagnosed heart condition.
“I think we’re still trying to wrap our mind around exactly what happened,” he said. “It’s just been such a whirlwind. It’s hard to believe that it actually happened, and we lived through that.”
By the end of the week, he had deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t walk from his living room to the kitchen.
Kevin, from Clarksville, Tennessee, loved to go to the gym every day and was active in his job as a flight test engineer for a defense contractor. He was accustomed to flying in military helicopters, not medical helicopters.
One day in November 2022, his stomach was very upset and he went to an urgent care center. No flu, they said; no COVID. The chest pain he chalked up to anxiety after his dad’s recent death. “I thought it was a stomach bug or something,” he said.
By the end of the week, he had deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t walk from his living room to the kitchen. His wife, Chassidy, drove him to the emergency room at a local hospital in Clarksville.
“All I remember was standing at the desk getting checked in, and then the next thing I remember was being in the back room and they’re cutting my shirt and they’re putting pads on me, and I guess my heart rate at that time was like 190, 200 beats per minute,” Kevin said. “The doctor had pads on me to shock my heart back to rhythm. Meanwhile, he’s telling Chassidy ‘we need to get him to Vanderbilt, LifeFlight him.’”
Kevin was rushed via helicopter to Vanderbilt. Once arriving at the emergency department, his heart rate was crashing. Medical personnel quickly put him on a life-sustaining medical system called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which can temporarily take over for the heart and lungs of critically ill patients.
“We took a team approach, getting the surgeons, the interventional cardiologists, the heart failure cardiologists all together to determine what we can do in these early moments when we really don’t know what happened, to stabilize this,” Siddiqi said.
“It is the highest level of cardiopulmonary mechanical support available in medicine today,” said Kevin’s cardiologist, Hasan Siddiqi, MD, assistant professor of Medicine.
“We took a team approach, getting the surgeons, the interventional cardiologists, the heart failure cardiologists all together to determine what we can do in these early moments when we really don’t know what happened, to stabilize this,” Siddiqi said.
Kevin was out of it for hours. He remembers waking up in a room in the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU) and seeing Chassidy and his children — daughter Elly, 17; and son Thatcher, 11. “Seeing them there definitely gave me a lot of energy and desire to live and try to fight with everything that I could do,” he said.
Hannah Bates, BSN, RN, one of the nurses caring for Kevin, remembers the multidisciplinary team fighting for his life along with him.
“Watching Mr. Moore and his family throughout his progress and recovery was a good reminder of the great team we have in the CVICU,” she said. “Kevin and his family handled everything with grace, asked the right questions and persevered to do what was needed to get better.”
Kevin remained on ECMO for almost four days.
“I felt like I was having a spiritual warfare,” he said. “I was saying prayers to God and at some point, God was like, you have to let go of this grief and pain that you’ve been holding on to from your dad. And I said a prayer, and I swear I felt just this release, like a spiritual release, and it was just gone.”
After 12 days, Kevin was released from the hospital, home in time for Thanksgiving.
Kevin said it was around this time that his heart function started returning. He was able to get out of bed and just walk a little, then a little more. And he wanted to know — what happened to me?
The answer was not altogether satisfying to him or his doctors.
“It’s one of those types of heart failure that we don’t understand that well yet,” Siddiqi said. “In his case, it was not an acute heart attack, for example. We looked through his coronaries and all that was clear. To this day, we’re trying to figure out exactly what led to the sequence of events. We were able to rule out a lot of the key issues using cardiac biopsies, advanced imaging modalities and other diagnostics. And we tailored treatment to our most educated opinion of what was the cause for his acute decline in heart function and how we can recover that.”
One possibility that crossed his mind was Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, also known as Broken Heart Syndrome. In other words, the idea that Kevin’s heart was literally broken by the loss of his father. It presents after an emotional event, positive or negative.
But Siddiqi said such events usually happen shortly after the stressor, not two weeks afterward. And the subsequent biopsy and cardiac MRI didn’t suggest it.
“The pattern of injury that we saw to his heart was not consistent with Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy,” Siddiqi said. “If anything, it was more consistent with a myocarditis of some sort — inflammation of the heart muscle.”
Many things can cause myocarditis, but the most common one is a viral infection, Siddiqi said. Moreover, doctors didn’t find any structural defects in his heart that would have explained it.
After 12 days, Kevin was released from the hospital, home in time for Thanksgiving. He started working part time in December and returned to full-time work in January. He’s also back in the gym.
“I think Kevin’s story really shows that if you can get people through that early sick period with the best management, the patient can do very well,” Siddiqi said.
He stresses that Kevin is not through with his heart disease journey. He is on several medications and still being monitored, but he is steadily improving.
Every time Kevin returns to Vanderbilt for a follow-up appointment, he makes sure to meet with a nurse or doctor or other medical provider who cared for him and thank them.
“I’m eternally grateful, we are, for everything that the doctors and nurses did, and I have a newfound respect for them,” he said. “They were definitely warriors there in the ICU.”
