ON THE MEND
With Heart
A COVID-19 DIAGNOSIS WAS JUST THE BEGINNING FOR ONE ST. LOUISAN.
It started with a cough. But within hours of returning home from work on a Friday night in December 2020, Kerri Bryles realized something much more sinister than a cold was ravaging her body. The initial concern was COVID-19. After four negative tests, Bryles received a positive result. And yet, soon after arriving at a local healthcare facility, Bryles and her family learned that the virus was just one of her worries.
Due to a shortage of available beds, Bryles was transferred to St. Luke’s Hospital in Chesterfield, where doctors treating her for respiratory failure found that she also had a malfunctioning heart valve. “They said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a heart event,’” recalls Bryles’s husband, Tim. Indeed, Bryles was suffering from an underlying condition known as torrential mitral regurgitation, which causes a large percentage of blood flow to leak backward, rather than pumping through the rest
