Heart patient hoping help arrives in time

This is a newspaper article about Luke's roommate's girlfriend, Bailey. She's a really amazing person and my heart goes out to her.

Heart patient hoping help arrives in time.
By Rachel Schleif
World staff writer

Friday, May 7, 2010

World photo/Don Seabrook

Bailey Northcott, with her therapy puppy, Kahu, listens to dog trainer Jodi Holmes as she gives her advice at Petco on Wednesday. Norhtcott, 19, received the dog a few weeks ago to help her while she waits for a heart replacement.

WENATCHEE — Until two years ago, everyone thought the attacks were all in Bailey Northcott’s head. They start with a crushing weight on her chest. Her breath quickens. Pain stabs at her lungs. The pain spreads from her left arm into her neck, just below her jaw.

“Everyone kept saying to me, ‘Bailey, you’re having a panic attack, go breathe into a paper bag. You’re going to be fine,’” the 19-year-old said.

She was a fifth-grader in Waterville when the attacks began. Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They tried asthma inhalers and antidepressants.

“It happened constantly. Whenever I would run in P.E. I felt like I couldn’t breath so I’d go to the office and they’d hand me a paper bag,” she said. “It wasn’t like they were being mean, they just didn’t know because all the doctors thought I was having panic attacks.”

Bailey was 17 when she transferred to Wenatchee High School for its theater program. She loved acting and performing on stage as someone else. She moved in with her grandmother, who drove her to school every day.

Walking to class one morning, Bailey’s heartbeat sped up uncontrollably. She felt dizzy and blacked out in the hall. A week later, doctors discovered her condition: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The muscle in Bailey’s left ventricle is thickening, which makes the chamber too small to pump out all the blood her body needs.

Bailey’s health has faded fast during the past two years. She’s lost the ability to walk, so she rode in a scooter during her last year in high school. She can’t eat meat or large meals because her heart can’t take the extra work. She sleeps sitting up to help her circulation. She says she suffered four attacks last week.

Doctors are waiting as long as possible to put Bailey on the heart transplant list. If they replace her heart before she’s 30, she will likely need another heart in her lifetime, she said. Her next reassessment is in July.

Last year, she traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where heart doctors helped her walk again. In November, surgeons at Seattle Children’s Hospital implanted a defibrillator in her chest to shock her heart if it stops.

“It’s failing faster and faster, every day it’s failing more and more,” she said of her heart. “After every one of those mini-heart attacks, I’m instantly worse than I was five minutes ago.”

Despite it all, she still laughs a lot. Her pixie haircut and 90-pound figure radiate positivity. She’s a hugger. Ironically, people tell her that her heart is the best part about her, she said.

“The minute I found out I was sick, people started calling me, crying and saying ‘I don’t want you to die,’” she said. “I realized then that I don’t get to be sad about this. I have to be strong so everyone can see that it’s going to be OK and I can fight through this.”

She said her family is her strength and joy, especially her 74-year-old grandmother. She was “the cool gramma” who drove a PT Cruiser with flames painted on the side. She swore and shouted during Gonzaga basketball games. For Obama’s inauguration ball, she dressed to the nines and danced with Bailey to “At Last” in their living room.

“I used to tease her that she’s the reason my heart is getting too big because I loved her so much and she’d give me so much love,” Bailey said.

Gramma Mikell died of a sudden stroke last month. Bailey was the last to speak with her in the hospital.

“She just wanted to look at me, and she told me how much she loved me and I told her how much I loved her,” she said.

Bailey has been packing boxes for the move back to her mother’s house in Waterville. Her doctor recently suggested she adopt a therapy dog, a chihuahua-Pekingese mix named Kahu, which is Hawaiian for guardian.

Although she graduated last year, Wenatchee High School students chose her as the beneficiary for the Mr. Panther fundraiser next week. She plans to save the money for online classes and a future heart transplant. She’s covered under her father’s insurance.

Bailey’s goal is to work at a children’s hospital, so she can help children come to terms with their illness.

“I feel like I must have been chosen to get sick so I could help someone,” she said. “That’s how I cope with this. I know I have to help someone somehow.”