This Reporter has a lot of Heart and Guts
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Think you have it hard at work?
Fox Sports sideline Reporter Jennifer Hale has to wear a defibrillator at all times beneath her clothing.
The device is designed to shock her back to life if her heart fails.
Hale has congestive heart failure and he doctor told her she needed bed rest, but she wanted to still do her job.
So, her doctor prescribed a hidden defibrillator that she wears beneath her blouse so no one would know about her life-threatening condition.
It began in 2016, when Hale began to feel extremely tired on the road. As an athlete herself, who runs and cycles long distances, her frenetic work schedule had never been an issue.
“I had taken a week off after the hectic NFL season, was home in New Orleans resting and relaxing, but still felt a total lack of energy,” remembered Hale. “It persisted when I went back on the road, but now I also had terrible swelling in my ankles. I was leaving to go to NBA meetings in New York and then a football game in Charlotte (North Carolina), and at a lunch break, I thought I’d go to my hotel room and take a short nap. I never woke up until housekeeping was banging on my door the next morning.”
In the emergency room, cardiac tests revealed that Hale’s heart was down to 16 percent of its pumping potential. She was placed in the cardiac intensive care unit and told to get ready for a long recovery and six months of bed rest. Her doctor placed her on the heart transplant list and a complex medical regimen, emphasizing that the medications worked only in the third of patients who, like Hale, didn’t have blocked arteries. A transplant was impossible: There were no matches.
"I refused bed rest," Hale said. "I told him if I only had a few years to live, I wasn’t going to spend it lying in bed, curled up in a ball, crying. When he suggested a portable defibrillator, I was all in.”
She never stopped working.
It’s been two years since the treatment began, and Hale's heart is now pumping at 50 percent capacity; she's been off the defibrillator since her heart's pumping capacity reached 35 percent. Fifty-five percent and higher for the main pumping chamber is considered normal, but it’s a slow process back.
