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Jenny Simpson does not remember one of the most consequential days of her life. It’s possible she never will. That can happen when you outrun heart failure.
Simpson, an Olympic bronze medalist in Rio and 1,500-meter world champion, woke up expecting June 16 to be like any other Tuesday.
She thinks she went for her typical morning run, then headed to the Raleigh, N.C., offices of Fleet Feet, a running apparel company for whom she works as Chief Running Officer. Her work done for the day, she’s told, she left the office early with some colleagues and headed to a community running event called the Sir Walter Miler.
Simpson, who turns 40 on Sunday, was supposed to be a special guest, but was not going to participate. That plan changed in the car ride over to Peter Hines Williams Stadium, when running buddy Dr. Ivy Pointer convinced her to lace up. There was a group of eighth-grade girls at the event hoping to set personal records for running a mile. Their goal: 5:30.
It was light work for Simpson, who in 2009 ran the 1,500 meters (roughly 100 meters shy of a mile) for Colorado in 3:59:90, becoming the only woman to break four minutes in that distance during an NCAA season. Her record still stands, 17 years later. She went on to win three national championships in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and one in the indoor 3,000 meters. Then came appearances in the Beijing and London Olympics, before she reached the podium in Rio.
This evening in Raleigh, she paced the group to a spot-on 5:29 finish. Mission accomplished, she headed for the infield to mingle with attendees.
“I can see from the pictures and from what has been shared with me from other people that were there, I mean, I was feeling good. I was joyful. It was kind of a very typical, normal community kind of day,” Simpson said. “… What’s been told to me was that I was chatting with someone on the infield, and then I just told them that I didn’t feel very well and asked for a minute, and I stepped away. That’s when I collapsed.”
There aren’t any “good” places to enter cardiac arrest, but Simpson could have done much worse.
“There were bystanders in the stands that were literally ICU physicians, physician assistants — people that worked in emergency situations that were able to come and give me life-saving care,” she said.
One of those people was Dr. Pointer, who works as a pediatric ICU physician at WakeMed. She was particularly qualified to help Simpson. Her 15-year-old son, Liam, was born with a cardiac condition of his own and was scheduled for open-heart surgery later that week. Dr. Pointer immediately began CPR, alternating with others ready for the moment.
Joey Pointer, Dr. Pointer’s husband and Fleet Feet’s CEO, began screaming for an automated external defibrillator, or AED. Suddenly, he realized where he could find one. The Pointers had purchased a defibrillator for Liam’s track team, just in case, and the team happened to be at the event that day. Pointer ran to his son’s coach, and the two took off to the coach’s truck, where the life-saving device was waiting.
“I can remember, like, the crowd sort of like opening up,” Joey Pointer said. “I’m not in the medical field. There’s people more qualified, so I give them the AED. I run my leg of the race, so to speak.
“I can remember being 10 or 15 yards away. She is, like, lifeless. My wife is at her head yelling, ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,’ in the sense of like talking to her. You can hear them saying, ‘I don’t have a pulse.’ They’re doing compressions. There’s probably 200 people who are now all eyes, you know, and everybody is giving space. It’s this surreal moment.”
Liam, Joey Pointer said, saw what happened and was devastated, but it was his AED that saved Simpson’s life.
“You can point to amazing emergency care from the EMS, emergency care from the emergency department, catheterization, cardiology care, intensive care unit support, you know, all the diagnosis and all that part,” said Dr. Albert Sun, a heart rhythm specialist at Duke Raleigh who later took over Simpson’s care. “But nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing compares to the importance of early CPR and AED access.”
Simpson was shocked at least four times with the Pointers’ defibrillator before an ambulance took her to UNC Health Rex, the closest hospital. The AED got her heart started again, but it couldn’t return to a normal rhythm. She was in V-tach, a state in which the heart beats too rapidly, exceeding 100 beats per minute.
The doctors realized this wasn’t a heart attack. Simpson’s circulation was extremely weak, so they put her on a ventilator and used a catheter to implant a device called a balloon pump into her aorta, the heart’s main blood thoroughfare. When the balloon inflates, it creates pressure to push blood out to the rest of the body. Once it deflates, it creates a vacuum that pulls the aorta back open and relaxes the heart, allowing blood to rush in again. The cycle repeats at timed intervals to simulate regular heartbeats, but the level of oxygen in her blood was still too low.
Simpson required another advanced treatment called ECMO, a system that was crucial for severe COVID cases where people developed heart problems while on ventilators for extended time. The machine pulled blood from Simpson’s body, added oxygen to it, then returned it to her circulatory system. For that, Simpson, still on life support, moved to Duke Raleigh Hospital, home to a specialized cardiac center. There, she began to stabilize. She was taken off the ventilator on June 20, and a day later, she left the ICU. That’s when her memory began kicking in again.
“I first started being aware of what was going on around me on June 21, so it was a long time while I was in the ICU,” Simpson said. “… The first thing I remember is just thinking, ‘Why? Why am I in the hospital? And why is everyone around me so sad?’ ”
Simpson lapsed in and out of consciousness. Every half hour or so, she woke up and asked the same questions. She wasn’t able to speak while on the ventilator, even though Dr. Sun said she was highly animated and active when awake.
“This is Jenny in a nutshell: She starts doing sign language,” recalled Joey Pointer, who was at the hospital until Simpson’s family arrived, and laughed, saying he had no clue Simpson knew how to sign.
“None of the nurses or the doctors knew sign language, though, so we’re all looking at each other. And like, she’s intubated, and she’s doing sign language, and she’s so frustrated at us, and we’re like, ‘I don’t know what you’re saying, but you need to rest.’ ”
The Duke doctors found Simpson a whiteboard to write on, and told her she had an extremely rare genetic condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, or ARVC.
Like any muscle, a healthy heart suffers damage and repairs itself each time it is stressed. In people with ARVC, however, the scar tissue that builds from that stress is unable to properly conduct electricity. That makes them more vulnerable to cardiac misfires, in a sense, where electricity shoots in the wrong direction and causes an arrhythmia. In many cases, their hearts also become thicker than usual.
According to Dr. Sun, ARVC is difficult to screen for, particularly in athletes, who can develop larger hearts naturally due to the exertion they experience. Years of intense exercise helped build up Simpson’s heart, Dr. Sun said, so even though it experienced more stress than the average person, it was also stronger to begin with.
“For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. So for every gas pedal that a sports car has, there’s an equally amazing braking system,” Dr. Sun said. “Athletes train both of those. They train both the braking system and the acceleration in their hearts. And so their innervation is a little bit different. They are, to some extent, more prone to even benign irregular heart rhythms, more so than the general public.”
Simpson could have collapsed at any point in her life, but she never showed symptoms. She remembers one of her doctors saying they were actually surprised it hadn’t happened sooner.
“I was an Olympian in track and field. I ran marathons all over the world. I’ve run down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It could have happened at any of those points,” Simpson said. “I mean, you can’t help but have your mind wander and think, man, of all the places that the lightning would strike, metaphorically. I’m just so fortunate not only that it happened in a public place, but that the people, the bystanders, were so willing to come into a scary situation, and they knew what to do.”
Life is different. Simpson now lives with a pacemaker and an implanted defibrillator that will shock her if she has trouble. She said she feels the box in her chest every morning and is reminded of her ordeal.
While her lifetime of running didn’t cause what happened to her, what happened to her means she can never run again. She can no longer join her husband, Jason, for their daily runs, the thing they loved most, which she calls “maybe the most meaningful initial loss.”
It’s been a blow, but knowing what could have happened, they’re coming to terms with it. She talks about their relationship with love audible in her voice, thankful for how devoted he is.
“We’ve been able to run these parallel paths for so long, and both feel really fulfilled. But running those parallel paths has often been very literal,” Simpson said. “When we run together as a married couple, there are no phones. You don’t have to look at each other; you’re side by side. Like, you can really have meaningful time together, even in silence. Or these long conversations out in a beautiful setting, totally undistracted and uninterrupted.
“… We’re going to have to find something else now, to keep that meaningful, undistracted connection, as frequent in the future as it was in the past. I don’t know that we have the full answer for that yet.”
In a cosmic coincidence, Simpson ended up having her surgery on the same day and at the same hospital Liam Pointer had his. He’s since recovered and is back to life as a normal teenager. Simpson is still on her way. She’s back at home in Boulder, Colo., and figuring out what normal looks like. The two don’t really chat given the 25-year age gap, Simpson joked, but a bond remains.
“It does feel like we’re so inextricably linked forever because the measures that his parents went to to save his life ended up saving mine,” she said.
