Sometimes, how we healthcare is found in the moment you realize the symptoms you have lived with your whole life were never just normal.
Katie Eddington crossed the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Seven years later, she was waking up from open-heart surgery. She was 34 years old, had a degree in sports medicine from UL Lafayette and worked as an athletic trainer with Ragin’ Cajun Athletics.
Katie had spent a lifetime learning to read her own body. She thought she knew exactly what she was working with.
She didn’t know the half of it.
Shortness of breath had a name for as long as Katie could remember: asthma. Diagnosed at 10, she pushed through anyway. She trained. She ran. When her distances got harder and her heart rate climbed higher than it should, she adjusted and kept going. There was no reason to think anything was wrong.
Then, at a routine gynecology visit, her doctor paused and asked one quiet question: “Has anyone ever told you that you have a heart murmur?”
No one had. Her doctor listened closely and referred her on.
A Diagnosis 20 Years in the Making
In cardiology, the picture came into focus. Katie had mitral valve prolapse with regurgitation. She had briefly seen a cardiologist at 16 after losing a brother to cardiomyopathy, but had been given a clean report at the time.
Now, working with a local cardiologist, more was revealed. A scope found a congenital hole between the right and left atrium. What began as watchful waiting became urgent, and Katie was referred to Chance DeWitt, MD, cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon with FMOL Health | Our Lady of Lourdes Heart Hospital.
Katie thought the first appointment was a meet-and-greet. Her husband, Evan, sensed otherwise.
He was right.
Twenty-One Days
Twenty-one days after that appointment, Katie was preparing for open-heart surgery. She had never had stitches. She had never had anesthesia. And for someone who usually wants every detail laid out in advance, she made a choice that surprised even her: she did not want to know everything.
“The more people tried to tell me what was going to happen, the more anxious I became,” she says.
So she trusted her team and let them lead.
Dr. DeWitt replaced Katie’s damaged mitral valve with a mechanical valve, a precisely engineered device designed to do what her natural valve no longer could, regulating blood flow through her heart with durability built to last a lifetime.
Evan sat in the waiting room, pager in hand, siblings gathered around him. When Dr. DeWitt appeared far sooner than anyone anticipated, Evan’s chest tightened. He braced for the worst.
Everything had gone right.
Katie spent nine days in the hospital. One lung partially collapsed, then recovered once she started moving. The chest tubes were the hardest part. And on her very first day walking, told to go to the hallway and back, she completed the full loop instead. Nobody told her to stop.
The Fear Beneath the Strength
Katie’s deepest fear was never for herself. A woman of faith who works at her church, she worried most about what her diagnosis might mean for Evan and for their 9-year-old daughter. If the worst happened, would it plant doubt in the people she loved most?
She chose honesty. She told her pastor. She had hard, tearful conversations, one on one, with friends who needed to hear it in person.
“Nobody is exempt,” she reflects. “Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.”
That candor became its own kind of ministry. Working with kids, she talks openly about fear, about how it does not disappear as we grow. We simply learn to carry it differently. Her story became one more way she could show up for the people around her.
The Road Back
Two weeks after surgery, Katie started cardiac rehab. Four months later, she ran a 5K. She told her rehab team upfront: “Your issue isn’t going to be pushing me. It’s going to be pulling me back.”
That same attentiveness eventually caught something new. Her heart rate was staying elevated longer than it should after exercise. Her care team kept digging until they found the answer: hemolytic anemia, a rare complication of her valve repair. Less than one percent of patients experience it.
“I don’t want this trophy,” she says. “Can someone else have it?”
She is still running. She has learned to pace herself and to honor that her heart is still mending. It is a lesson, she notes, that finds all of us eventually.
Our Joy-Filled Team
What Katie remembers most is not just the skill of the people around her. It is their spirit. Nurses who were thorough without being cold. A rehab team who noticed something was off and stayed curious until they had answers.
And a quiet moment near the end of her hospital stay, after eight days without washing her hair, when a nurse and a friend simply helped her do just that. A small thing. A meaningful one.
“They had a joy about them,” Katie says. “Even on the hard days.”
Katie’s story is a reminder that heart conditions do not arrive on a predictable schedule. They do not sort by age or fitness level or how carefully you have taken care of yourself. They show up in athletes and in mothers and in people who thought they already had all the answers.
The appointment you keep, the question you ask, the symptom you refuse to explain away: that is where it begins. And that is where it can end differently.
Katie knows that now in a way she couldn’t before.
“Knowing your body is key in getting the care that you deserve,” she says. “I wasn’t afraid of surgery when we set the date. I wasn’t even afraid of death itself. Fear was in my what if’s. … Praise God that His plans are promises bigger than us. I’m thankful that God placed purpose in my medical team to save lives and be part of the miracle that is my life.”
