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Awareness week shines light on cardiac rehabilitation and the people who go through it

Times West Virginian - 2/20/2018

Feb. 16--FAIRMONT -- Crystal Fast sits on a rowing machine, pulling herself back and forth across the board surrounded by other exercise equipment.

She manages to complete a few sets on the machine without too much trouble. The real trouble was getting herself to this point, as just a few months ago, she found herself out of breath just walking up some stairs.

As she explained this, she got up and walked over to a spinning machine in Fairmont Regional Medical Center's cardiac rehabilitation room for a leg workout.

"I couldn't walk and I couldn't breathe well. I had to stop. So since January I went from two minutes on this thing to 12 minutes," Fast, a worker in the psych unit at FRMC, said during her 15th session in cardiac rehab.

This week is cardiac rehab awareness week, and is meant to recognize individuals such as Fast who suffer from issues of the heart that need exercise to overcome. It's also a time for the specialty nurses to educate others on the causes of these issues and how to avoid developing them.

"Cardiac rehab exercises those people after they've had any kind of heart event," Yvonne Hershman said. "In order to open up those blood vessels and get her healthy, we exercise, and exercise opens up those blood vessels."

Opening in 1980 as the second cardiac rehab center in West Virginia, FRMC's center is meant to walk patients through exercises that help open the blood vessels back to a healthy constant. The staff of the center tailor a workout program to different patients accommodating any ability, from the heavy first steps to the running end.

"We create their exercise program, take them through it. We do it based on their neediness and the variant of their condition," Chris Hedio, exercise physiologist at FRMC, said.

Hershman works with patients in the rehab center three days a week, walking them through exercises and keeping them on a healthy track until they are able to live comfortably. Patients may have suffered a heart attack, blood clot, or a range of other problems relating to the heart which could all land them in the center and in need of rehabilitation.

Hershman explained that most patients need to complete a 36-session program to be cleared for exit. In addition to walking them through exercises, Hershman and the staff keep track of a patient's blood pressure and also evaluate him or her with a stress-risk factor, denoting the risk of another heart incident.

For example, this run of sessions is the second for patient Gerald Ashcraft, who received double-bypass surgery about three years ago, and has returned for rehabilitation because of a heightened risk-factor.

"Gerald is in our program. Those people who have had positive stress tests that come to exercise in our program we monitor physically their heart rate, their blood pressures, their blood sugars, their weight," Hershman said. "And we send reports to not only their primary care physician but to their cardiologist. They exercise three days a week one hour a day and we keep a close eye on them."

As both Hershman and Hedio explained, the fear a patient experiences in a heart attack can follow him or her even after returning to health, so part of the program is helping to overcome that fear.

"Anything you have done to your heart, there's a fear factor. So by the end of three months we want to make sure they know that their heart rate is OK, their blood pressure is OK, their blood sugar is all right. And that they can do what they want to and feel safe doing it at the end of three months," Hershman said.

"After you have some type of cardiac event, it really does help. It really does improve not only your heart function but your quality of life," Hedio added.

Though they may face tough situations together, spending so much time with these patients is no chore for the staff. Hershman herself finds the friendships formed through the program as one of its greatest benefits.

"There's a lot of friendships developed over three months," Hershman said. "It's a lot of fun and we're grateful for the staff and patients we work with."

Hershman said that every other Wednesday the workers in the cardiac rehab program host educational sessions to give information about healthy diets and medication. For more information, visit frmcwv.com/cardiac-rehabilitation/.

Email Eddie Trizzino at etrizzino@timeswv.com and follow him on Twitter @eddietimeswv.

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