Chloe Burke has always felt most relaxed on a football field.
An avid athlete her entire life, the Texas native thrived as a D1 college cheerleader at the University of Houston and never missed a game.
Then one day in 2019, while in the middle of a game routine, the 21-year-old collapsed to the ground.
“Everything went black,” Mrs Burke, now 25, told DailyMail.com. Tests would later reveal that she had suffered a rare cardiac arrest. There was no history of heart problems in the family.
What followed was a frantic race to save his life, including three electric shocks to restart the organ and, ultimately, brutal open-heart surgery, in which doctors were forced to open his chest and split his sternum. in half to access the heart.
Chloe Burke suffered cardiac arrest at age 21 while cheerleading at the University of Houston. She is now educating others about cardiac arrest as she competes for Miss Texas.
Ms Burke was born with myocardial bridging heart disease, although she didn’t know it until she went into cardiac arrest. She underwent open heart surgery and spent four months in rehabilitation.
Despite a laborious recovery in which she had to learn to walk and breathe again, Mrs Burke returned to the football field for the next game, just 11 weeks after surgery.
Now, in her new role as a beauty queen, who received the title of Miss Space City Houston last year, she is dedicating her life to teaching others about the deadly heart disease that nearly killed her.
While some beauty queens are known for their desire for world peace, Ms. Burke wants to save more Americans from catastrophic cardiac events.
She is pushing for new legislation that would introduce CPR lessons to schools and ensure widespread access to machines that can restart hearts with electric shocks, called an automated external defibrillator (AED).
As part of her advocacy work, Ms. Burke recently partnered with the American Heart Association (AHA) and traveled to Washington, DC to lobby for two heart health bills: the Heart Health Education, Awareness, and Health Act. Cardiomyopathy Health Research and Training in Schools (HEARTS). and the AED Access Act.
In addition to legislative action, Ms. Burke also travels throughout the state of Texas to speak about the importance of heart health and advocate for your medical needs.
While his collapse may have been a shock, he said American Heart Association She had suffered strange health problems for several years as a teenager, but doctors dismissed her as an “overly dramatic young hypochondriac.”
Burke said she began experiencing myocardial bridging symptoms in high school, which became more severe as she grew older and more active. “It just went from bad to worse,” she said. The cheerleading effort likely caused him to go into cardiac arrest.
Burke spent much of his adolescence suffering from acute pain in his left arm and chest. In college, he would faint due to severe dizziness.
She wrote for the AHA: “I spent over a year trying to find a proper diagnosis. I was not diagnosed due to my age, gender, and lack of family history with heart problems.
Studies have long suggested that heart problems in women are much less likely to be detected than those in men, due to doctors’ assumptions about the typical heart patient.
A 2011 study Women reportedly often undergo fewer heart-related diagnostic tests than men, experience delays in treatment, and receive less aggressive therapies.
However, cardiovascular disease kills more women than all forms of cancer combined, and nearly 45 percent of women ages 20 and older live with some form of the disease.
And even after her cardiac arrest (when the heart suddenly stops beating) and subsequent surgery, it took more than a year for Ms. Burke to receive her diagnosis of myocardial bypass, a congenital (present at birth) heart defect.
Myocardial bypass is a defect in which a person’s left artery, the main artery that supplies blood and oxygen to the brain and body, is enclosed within the heart muscle rather than on top of it.
While this is usually harmless, in some rare cases the heart muscle presses on the part of the artery that runs through it, making it difficult for blood to flow to the heart.
This can cause shortness of breath, dizziness, and heart palpitations, but repeated stress can weaken the heart over time.
It can also cause irregular heartbeats, lack of blood flow to the heart, and sudden cardiac death.
On average, about 25 percent of people have myocardial bridging, but only five percent know they have it, according to Stanford University.
While he didn’t know he had the condition until after his cardiac arrest, he experienced classic symptoms as early as high school.
Mrs Burke said: “Every time my heart pumped, that artery squeezed in my body.” My brain wouldn’t get oxygen, and the more that artery was squeezed, the weaker it became.
‘(My symptoms) became more aggressive as I got older. They were very aggressive in college. I was passing out several times a week, I had to go to urgent care several times a week because I couldn’t see anything.
‘As the years went by, that artery became weaker because it was compressed all the time. The harder I tried, the more it would compress and the weaker it would become.
“It just got worse and worse.”
Ms. Burke now works with the American Heart Association to raise awareness about cardiac arrest and access to AEDs.
In her work, Ms. Burke lobbies for two bills, the HEARTS Act and the AED Access Act. She hopes both bills will provide more resources and training for children on how to help someone in cardiac arrest.
After cardiac arrest in the camp, Ms. Burke underwent a traumatic operation in which surgeons opened her chest to access her heart and make repairs.
The procedure saved his life, but recovery was grueling.
“I basically had to learn to reuse all the muscles in my chest because they all tore,” he said.
Ms Burke was also sent to several weeks of cardiac rehabilitation, during which she would do different levels of exercise so that her heart could gradually get used to pumping and beating at higher rates.
She said: ‘I did my rehab and ate, slept and breathed for 11 weeks. It was a huge physical and mental barrier, but it’s something I worked on every day alone.
“And I really think my mentality of grit and determination is what got me through it faster.”
“The more people learn it, the more proactive culture and community we will have around us, people who can act in a matter of seconds and save someone’s life and quality of life,” Ms Burke said.
Despite her setback, Ms. Burke graduated from college on time with a perfect GPA.
She attributes her success to a strong network of friends and family, all of whom learned how to perform chest compressions and use an AED.
Ms Burke added: “It really showed (my friends) how to be proactive in situations and be prepared for situations like that.”
“And I think that led to me having such a strong support system and allowed me to achieve great things again immediately after this huge, life-changing incident occurred.”
Mrs Burke notes that she is “one in a million lucky” as she suffered far fewer complications than many other cardiac arrest survivors.
But she still needs to take frequent breaks and pace herself in her job as a personal trainer, and suffers from bouts of lightheadedness.
“I have to be very aware of my own body and what’s going on in it and know how to pace myself during certain things to avoid exhaustion that happens faster,” she said.
The trainer added: “When I work out, or lead other people in fitness classes and things like that, I constantly know what’s going on in my body and how to pace myself when I get to those levels of exhaustion faster and I hope I say that from my heart, I just get tired too quickly.’
However, apart from measuring her blood pressure every day and taking medication to regulate it, Ms Burke has not had to make any major changes to her lifestyle.
Now, after three years of pageants and winning the title of Miss Space City Houston, she is using her platform to educate others about the signs and prevention of cardiac arrest.
“The more people learn it, the more proactive culture and community we will have around us, people who can act in a matter of seconds and save someone’s life and quality of life,” Ms Burke said.
