BY LESLIE CARDÉ | Special to The Advocate SEP 30, 2018 – 6:00 PM

Imagine that your heart is working at one-third capacity.

You’ve been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and ordered to bed rest. But you decide to continue working — in an active job, in the public eye.

In desperation, your cardiac physician prescribes a portable defibrillator, to be worn at all times beneath your clothing. It is designed to shock you back to life, should your heart fail.

This was the answer for Jennifer Hale, a Fox Sports sideline reporter from New Orleans who covers NFL, NBA, and college games all over the United States. Suffering from heart failure but unwilling to give up the work she loves, the LSU alumna wore the hidden defibrillator on playing fields all across the country, buttoning it beneath her blouse so no one would know about her life-threatening condition.

It began in 2016, when Hale began to feel extremely tired on the road. As an athlete herself, who runs and cycles long distances, her frenetic work schedule had never been an issue.

“I had taken a week off after the hectic NFL season, was home in New Orleans resting and relaxing, but still felt a total lack of energy,” remembered Hale. “It persisted when I went back on the road, but now I also had terrible swelling in my ankles. I was leaving to go to NBA meetings in New York and then a football game in Charlotte (North Carolina), and at a lunch break, I thought I’d go to my hotel room and take a short nap. I never woke up until housekeeping was banging on my door the next morning.”

Rondé Barber, a sports analyst at Fox, noticed that his normally outgoing colleague was quieter and didn’t look right. “So as a friend, I asked her what was going on. She leveled with me that she’d been seeing doctors who couldn’t find anything wrong. Jen lives out of a bag and runs herself ragged, so I understood that she blew it off as a workload issue, but I told her I was very concerned.”

Hale asked Barber to keep her condition quiet. But before long, he was rolling her luggage to cabs because the smallest exertion left her winded.

Family history

The dots that Hale wasn’t connecting had to do with her family history. Her father, a former customs agent with the Department of the Treasury who investigated drug and human trafficking, died of a heart attack at 50, but Hale figured that was a result of stress, drinking and smoking, and poor eating habits.

An uncle died at 48 and a grandfather at 50, again, of heart attacks. But Hale was only 38, and a woman. What did that have to do with her?

Hale was quickly descending into heart failure, but she didn’t have a clue.

Limited blood work and a chest X-ray ordered by multiple doctors came back normal, but one doctor was still worried and suggested Hale go to the emergency room immediately.

“I thought he was being overly dramatic,” she said. But she said she believes her trip to the emergency room probably saved her life.

That is, unfortunately, a common scenario, said Dr. Frank Smart, chief of cardiology at LSU Health Sciences New Orleans.

It turned out that Hale had cardiomyopathy, in which the heart’s pumping action is failing, the heart has to work harder, it gets stretched thin, and it takes more and more blood to fill it up, Smart said. Blood backs up into the lungs and causes fluid deposits around the heart, a condition known as congestive heart failure. Smart is not Hale’s cardiologist but was formerly at Ochsner working with heart transplant patients, where Hale is under the care of Dr. Clement Eiswirth.

Gasping for air

With congestive heart failure, “any exercise at all causes gasping for air as your heart and lungs try to pull in oxygen, but those organs aren’t working because they’re full of fluid,” Smart said.

In the emergency room, cardiac tests revealed that Hale’s heart was down to 16 percent of its pumping potential. She was placed in the cardiac intensive care unit and told to get ready for a long recovery and six months of bed rest. Her doctor placed her on the heart transplant list and a complex medical regimen, emphasizing that the medications worked only in the third of patients who, like Hale, didn’t have blocked arteries. A transplant was impossible: There were no matches.

“I refused bed rest,” Hale said. “I told him if I only had a few years to live, I wasn’t going to spend it lying in bed, curled up in a ball, crying. When he suggested a portable defibrillator, I was all in.”

She never stopped working.

A new responsibility

It’s been two years since the treatment began, and Hale’s heart is now pumping at 50 percent capacity; she’s been off the defibrillator since her heart’s pumping capacity reached 35 percent. Fifty-five percent and higher for the main pumping chamber is considered normal, but it’s a slow process back. 

Hale recently was the recipient of this year’s Achievement Award from the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. Hale is an alumna of the program whose former students include prominent politicians, media professionals and technology wizards.

The group’s goal is to teach civic responsibility to students, and Hale said she believes it’s now her responsibility to impart her story to everyone — reducing casualties by raising awareness.

“If my grandfather, father and uncle had known about this condition and could have received medical intervention, perhaps they’d be alive today,” she said.

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