Sometimes, how we healthcare is the difference between “We’ll see” and “We’re ready.”
Cassie Falgoust, 55, had stopped working to care for her dad. He had passed in February. So, when her husband needed help in the yard that summer morning, she was glad to step in. That’s just who she is. Someone who shows up.
She was mid-task when the pain hit.
“I felt this enormous pop in my chest,” she says. “Like my chest exploded. I thought something was terribly wrong.”
She took a shower, and when the ambulance arrived at the end of her road, she walked out to meet it. Her daughters scolded her later. You should have called 911 immediately. But Cassie, even in crisis, was trying to hold things together.
At the hospital in Thibodaux, it didn’t take long to hear the words that matter most in an emergency: Cassie needed a higher level of care. Where did she want to go?
Her daughters answered before she could.
One daughter is an ER nurse. The other, Abbey Gonzalez, is a physical therapist at FMOL Health | Our Lady of the Lake Heart & Vascular Institute, where Cassie would be treated. The sisters looked at each other and said the same thing at the same time.
The Lake.
A helicopter was already on the way.
Cassie knew too much to feel calm on that flight. Her brother had gone through something similar, a dissected aorta, and he had survived the initial event. But he hadn’t kept his follow-up appointments. He hadn’t done what needed to be done. He died of an aneurysm later, and Cassie carried that with her as the helicopter moved over Louisiana toward Baton Rouge.
She didn’t know what else to do, so she started joking with the crew. It kept her mind moving forward instead of falling into the fear underneath.
“It still is scary when I think about it,” she says. “Very.”
At the hospital, while the team was preparing for surgery, a doctor quietly asked a nurse for a phone. They wanted her to be able to reach someone. Cassie closed her eyes and pulled up a number she knew by heart.
She called her husband, Ted, and told him she loved him.
Ready for What Many Hospitals Aren’t
Cardiothoracic surgeon Swayze Rigby, MD, and his team were waiting when Cassie arrived. An aortic dissection, a tear in the inner wall of the body’s main artery, is one of the most dangerous events the human body can face. Without immediate surgical intervention, the aorta can rupture. The odds Cassie walked in with were stark.
“They told me one in eight don’t survive the incident,” she says. “Only about 20 percent survive the surgery. And I lived through the whole thing. I believe God had a hand in it. But I also believe those surgeons saved my life.”
Her case was among the most severe the team had seen. She would return for a second procedure days later, where surgeons placed bovine mesh to address severe stenosis and stabilize the repair. The care was layered, precise and continuous, exactly what a case like hers required.
Waking Up
Cassie’s first clear memory after surgery was seeing her children’s faces and not knowing, for a moment, whether she was still alive.
She was intubated. Through the fog, she could see them gathered around her, crying. Her first thought: am I dead, and this is what it looks like?
“And then I realized, no, I’m alive,” she says. “Because I felt the tube.”
She went back to sleep. When she woke again, Ted was still there. He had never left the hospital. The arithmetic of survival settled over her slowly: she had lived through the event, and she had lived through the surgery. Now she had to live through everything that came next.
“If I can do that,” she remembers thinking, “I’ll do whatever I need to do.”
A Condition That Runs in the Family
The dissection wasn’t a freak accident. After she recovered, doctors explained it was hereditary — connected to a connective tissue disorder that wasn’t well understood until the early 2000s. Looking back, the signs had always been there. She had been tired for years, never quite rested, and had chalked it up to working full time while raising four kids.
“They didn’t add up at the time,” she says. “When you look back, oh yeah, oh yeah.”
Her oldest son tested positive. One of his children did, too. Her other children are weighing whether to be tested. Her sister came back negative. Her niece as well. For Cassie, the diagnosis carries a weight that has nothing to do with her own prognosis. What moved through her body could be quietly waiting inside the people she loves most.
She doesn’t wallow in that. She just pays attention.
Where Her Daughter Works
Abbey had walked the hallways at the Lake every day without ever imagining her mother would be there as a patient.
But Cassie was never just a patient. Nurses who knew Abbey stopped by even when they weren’t assigned to her. Staff who weren’t on duty peeked in to ask how she was doing. Housekeeping checked on her. Ted, who never left, was cared for too. The nursing staff making sure he had what he needed while he waited.
One nurse, Mary Doan, RN, stood apart. She had a way of finding each person in the room and meeting them exactly where they were — talking football with Ted, finding common ground everywhere she turned.
“She was a ray of sunshine,” Cassie says. “You couldn’t think of anything else but the person in front of you when you were talking to her.”
When it was time to go home, Mary wheeled her out. They took a photo together.
“Everyone was great,” Cassie says. “I can’t say enough.”
Baton Rouge Traffic on Purpose
When it came time to choose follow-up care, Cassie could have transferred to someone closer. She lives about 50 minutes from Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center. She didn’t even consider it.
Dr. Rigby and the rest of her care team, cardiologists and vascular specialists, because her condition requires both, never treated her like a number or a file. They explained everything. They took their time. A year later, she still feels it.
“They feel more like friends and family than just your doctors,” she says. “I still feel the love a whole year later. It’s amazing.”
On the recommendation of both her daughters, Cassie committed to cardiac rehab twice a week for 36 weeks. At the start, she was too afraid to walk laps around her own house. She did it anyway. Rehab gave her a countdown, a routine and, often, the same faces she had known from the floor.
“I would highly recommend cardiac rehab to anyone,” she says. “Especially The Lake’s.”
Living Differently
Survival brought a new set of rules, and Cassie follows every one.
She has a 10-pound dead-lift limit. No extreme pushing or pulling. Regular CAT scans to watch for aneurysms. She can’t lift her grandchildren the way she used to.
So she found another way. She lets one of them wrap his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck, holding him close without lifting him off the ground.
“I just do it a little differently sometimes,” she says.
She eats low sodium and low sugar, watches her cholesterol and keeps moving every day even when she doesn’t feel like it. She wears an Apple Watch. She tracks herself. She does not skip appointments.
She knows what happens when people skip appointments.
Heart of a Mom
After her mother passed, Cassie stepped into the role of matriarch. She is the oldest of four siblings now, with one brother gone. She has four children, five grandchildren and a husband who moved far outside his comfort zone to care for her the way she had always cared for everyone else.
All of that is why she does what she does now. Every appointment. Every drive to Baton Rouge. Every small accommodation for her body’s new limits.
“God saved me and the doctors gave me the time,” she says. “I want to do the best I can.”
The drive isn’t a burden. She and Ted make a day of it. They take the trips they used to put off.
“I want to be there to take care of my grandbabies,” she says. “To enjoy time together. To be the matriarch we don’t have.”
Sometimes, surviving the unthinkable doesn’t just give you more days. It gives you a clearer reason for every single one of them and a family, both chosen and clinical, who helped make sure you could have them.
