This page is to help support Tatiana and her family as she navigates this especially challenging time with her health. Please read how her heart health journey began below. Tatiana just received a diagnosis of Giant Cell Myocarditis. This story began with a trip to urgent care in Shrewsbury with complaints of chest, neck and shoulder pain and difficulty breathing. They misdiagnosed her here with cardiomyopathy (heart muscle weakness). They call this broken heart syndrome because it can often be a cause of severe stress or trauma. As her beloved dog, Duncan, had just crossed the rainbow bridge, it didn’t feel like a far stretch given how very broken hearted she was. She was sent home with some medicine and told to take it easy. Things continued to get worse and luckily she trusted her intuition to go back in to the ER. From here, things moved very quickly. Her troponin levels in her blood were over 2000 (these are supposed to be in the low single digits), her blood pressure plummeted and then she had ventricular tachycardia and had to be shocked/resuscitated. The doctors acknowledged that they were out of their depth and had Tasha flown to Boston, Beth Israel Deacones Medical Center, via helicopter. Once here, they set her up on ECMO and an Impella device. These are both forms of life support that help her heart pump and circulate blood for her. Once her heart was supported, they took a biopsy to help diagnose what was going on. All they could see on her scans was a weakened lower left heart chamber but we didn’t know why. The biopsy results showed Idiopathic Giant Cell Myocarditis. This is a very rare form of autoimmune myocarditis (heart muscle inflammation). In Giant Cell Myocarditis, inflammatory cells come together to attack your heart muscle and cause scarring. The statistics of survival and recovery for this are very scary and because of its rarity it is pretty poorly understood. Thus began the process of getting Tasha on the heart transplant list. Seven days of being on ECMO and Impella, with a lot of other medical support and immune suppressants gave Tatiana’s heart some time to heal a bit and they liked the functions they were seeing. She had the procedure to come off both of them on Tuesday and her heart is functioning on its own!!! We’ve gotten a lot of congratulations and positivity from her medical team as this is best case scenario for now. We are not completely out of the woods and still in cardiac intensive care. We are in wait and see mode, which you might imagine is extremely difficult. We are still having conversations about possible and or eventual transplant and were reminded that just because her heart is beating on its own, doesn’t take away the condition of Giant Cell Myocarditis. It is also worth mentioning that Tasha has been mostly alert and awake through all of this. The doctors keep saying how nice it is that she’s not intubated and is able to tell them when something doesn’t feel right. Today she is finally able to be sitting up and is having a “spa day” and getting her hair washed and braided. The nurses even bought her some yarn and crocheting supplies for once she’s up to getting back to one of her favorite hobbies. So so sweet! She has her mom Tami, her sister Dominique, and her Partner James here with her showering her in love and support. Thank you for all your well wishes. I will update again when there is more to know.