I’m Aware That I’m Rare: Karen Reams (262)

The phaware® interview

CTEPH patient Karen Reams discusses the elation of the possibility of a cure for her PH and the devastation in being told her blot clots are too distal for PTE surgery.

I’m Karen Reams, I am a pulmonary hypertension patient.

What led to my diagnosis, was I had been noticing for years that I was short of breath. I was a smoker, so of course, you smoke, you’re going to be short of breath. Well, it just kept eventually getting worse and worse. So, I quit smoking and it didn’t get any better. I thought, “Okay, now time to tell my doctor.” So, I told my general practitioner that I’m getting short of breath. He said, “All right, we got to get you to a cardiologist.” I went to a cardiologist, ran some tests, did an echocardiogram. He said the echo didn’t look good. He put me in for a heart catheterization. While I was in there, he noticed that the pressures in my lungs were high. So, he went and got a pulmonologist from the hospital to come in to the room where I was getting the heart catheterization to diagnose the pulmonary hypertension…