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This article was published 25/11/2022 (663 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Kelley, we need to reboot your heart.”

Kelley Turnbull and her husband, Rick, had been watching TV at home one evening in the fall of 2017, and her heart rate had shot up to 140 beats per minute, twice her normal resting heart rate. She could feel it racing. Rick rushed her to St. Boniface Hospital’s Emergency Department, where she was seen right away. Three months before her visit to Emergency, Turnbull had open-heart surgery at St. Boniface to replace her aortic valve. The mechanical valve she now had sounded to her like a Timex wristwatch in her chest, and she could hear it ticking away. She wondered if she was in trouble. Startled, she asked, “What do you mean by ‘reboot’? Like a laptop computer?”

“We’re going to use a drug to stop your heart,” the physician in the room explained. “Then, the same drug will start it again, and it will return to a normal rate.” She knew she didn’t have a choice. A nurse held her hand because she was scared.

“Busy as they were in the Emergency Department, it wasn’t, the hustle-bustle, rush me through. They took the time at St. Boniface to let me know I was going to be OK, and I was,” she said. “I felt secure, and that’s an amazing feeling when you’re going through something traumatic.” It was time. Her husband was with her. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her heart was beating normally. The reboot had worked!

“You never know what somebody has gone through at work, or what kind of day they are having, but at St. Boniface they are always there for you and your family.”

“The nurses there were so attentive to me and my family, both when I had my operation and after, when I had to go to the Emergency Department,” said Turnbull.

“I owe them my life, probably twice.”

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