Her stomachache turned out to be heart failure

Two weeks into a new job as an in-house lawyer in Boston, Saraa Basaria wanted to make a good impression. So for a company bakeoff, she whipped up a dark chocolate raspberry cake with orchids on top.

At her kitchen counter, a pang of nausea overtook her. Then it passed.

Her cake won the competition. That night, she vomited. Food poisoning, Basaria thought.

Two days later, she was still sick and weak from not eating. Days later, she saw her doctor. Stomach viruses can persist, her doctor said. So Basaria went home to rest.

When the nausea wouldn't let up, she went to urgent care. Her bloodwork was normal. It's a gastrointestinal issue, the doctor said. Stress and anxiety were probably at play, too, the doctor told her. She was a busy lawyer, after all.

Over the next five weeks, Basaria – then 34 – had to sleep sitting up. Otherwise, she felt like an elephant was on her chest. She was so weak that her sister, Sahar Basaria, pushed her in a wheelchair to medical appointments.

Saraa had a CT scan of her abdomen, which was normal. Still sick, she went to urgent care and the emergency room several more times.

More than a month after the bakeoff, Saraa saw an ear, nose and throat doctor after a physician friend speculated she might have a mass in her throat. The ENT saw Saraa's pallid complexion and sent her to urgent care for fluids. At home, Saraa threw up again.

Sahar called their parents in Florida. Their mother, Nilo Basaria, flew to Boston. The next morning, Saraa planned to ask her primary care provider for help taking a leave from work. She wasn't sleeping or eating normally and couldn't focus during meetings.

On the video call, her clinician took one look at her gaunt face and said: "I have no idea what's going on with you. But you need to be inside a hospital right now."

In the ER, when Saraa mentioned it was hard to take a full breath, the doctor ordered an electrocardiogram, which measures the heart's electrical activity. Results were abnormal. She was hospitalized.

Two days later, an echocardiogram, or ultrasound of her heart, showed that her heart was enlarged and surrounded by fluid.

"You're in end-stage heart failure," her doctor said.

Saraa was also in cardiogenic shock, a life-threatening condition in which the heart can't pump enough blood to fuel the body. All along, her stomach had been out of sorts, in part because barely any blood had been reaching it.

Her heart's ejection fraction, a measurement of how much blood the left ventricle pumps with each contraction, was 8% versus a normal heart's 50% to 70%.

"If you pray," a doctor told her family, "now's the time."

The next morning, Saraa wasn't better. But she hadn't gotten any worse. Her doctor wanted to see if medication could help her heart. A week later, when she hadn't significantly improved, he told her she needed a heart transplant. And, while waiting for a match, she needed a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, a machine implanted into her chest that would essentially do the work of the left side of her heart.

About two months after her stomach troubles first started, Saraa got the LVAD.

When she woke up from the surgery, she could take a full breath. She was grateful, but the life change was dramatic. Saraa had to get used to the wires sticking out of her body, to cleaning the nearby skin to prevent infection and to keeping the device charged, which meant portable batteries by day and plugging into an outlet at night.

Saraa's parents moved into her one-bedroom apartment to help, and Sahar helped change her dressings. Sahar put on a brave face but was overwhelmed by thoughts of her older sister dying.

Seven months after her ordeal started, Saraa returned to work part time, her LVAD gear stashed in a stylish bag Sahar helped her find. Working helped Saraa to feel more like herself. She started doing yoga, meditating, journaling, working out with a personal trainer and hiking.

Nearly a year and a half after she got her LVAD, Saraa had a routine follow-up echo. The test showed that her heart was pumping out much more blood than expected. After more testing, her doctor sat her down to talk.

"You're in remission from heart failure," the doctor said. "You don't need an LVAD, and you won't need a transplant." Saraa broke down, shedding tears of joy.

She and her doctors opted to have her LVAD "decommissioned" – it would stay inside her but be turned off – rather than going through the complicated surgery of removing it entirely. She recovered in the hospital over Christmas 2023 and came home for New Year's.

Saraa watched fireworks from the roof of Sahar's building alongside family and friends. Soon after, she went back to work full time. She embraced travel, flying to London, southern France for the Olympics and Turks and Caicos. She got certified to teach yoga, which she now does at the studio where she found solace after getting her LVAD.

"Saraa is living her best life," Sahar said. "She's really living."

Still, Saraa often has trouble believing she was so fortunate. She never learned the cause of her heart issue – it could have been a virus – but she believes becoming more active helped her recovery.

"It was also finding space to connect with my body and my sense of self," Saraa said. "Finding some semblance of peace when I was in turmoil gave my body the space that it needed to heal itself."

Stories From the Heart chronicles the inspiring journeys of heart disease and stroke survivors, caregivers and advocates. American Heart Association News covers heart and brain health. Not all views expressed in this story reflect the official position of the American Heart Association. Copyright is owned or held by the American Heart Association, Inc., and all rights are reserved.