LIKE LAZARUS, CHAPTER 230 MEMBER ROSE FROM 'DEATH BED" TO INSPIRE HEART PATIENTS TO DO THE SAME
By Roger
Campbell
HEARTBEAT Editor
Effie Palace was as good as dead. Her heart ruptured, her 315-pound body struggling to recover from angioplasty and quadruple bypass surgery, her kidneys shut down, she was "gone." Gone at age 62. Gone from her beloved husband and two sons. Gone from two grandchildren she yearned to see grow up.
"I was practically dead - or should have been," she says, "but I was born again." Miraculously, Palace rose from her hospital bed. That's why staff at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital call her Lazarus. Despite being overweight, diabetic and having high blood pressure, Effie Palace overcame medical odds in December 1994 when emergency surgery to close a hole in her heart saved her life.
Now, almost eight years later and 140 pounds lighter, the spunky grandmother of four is full of life. She eats healthy. She works out two times a day for an hour in cardiac rehabilitation. She's off medication for diabetes.
"I got a second chance," she says. It's more than a second chance to live, though. Much more. Now, Palace says, having rose from her hospital bed, she's inspiring other heart patients to do the same. Even before she became an active member of Chapter 230, Palace was making the rounds in St. Joseph Mercy Oakland to encourage others.
"She is one of our biggest success stories," says Patricia Bagchi of St. Joseph Mercy Oakland. "There were so many things wrong with her, but she was determined to change her own life. "Effie has a way about her. She's full of life, loves life. She's inspired a lot of people."
Palace's inspirational message is simple: "If I can make it, anybody can." That's one of the things she tells worried and weary heart patients when she looks intently into their eyes while she participates in Mended Hearts Chapter 230 visiting program every Monday.
"She has
been a diligent member," says Chapter 230 president Melvin Lewin,
noting that she regularly attends monthly meetings every third
Wednesday.
"If I can help one person," Palace says, "I've accomplished something.
Some patients don't want to listen, don't care. They don't want to get
out of that hospital bed. I take my picture with me so that they can
see what I used to look like. I was fat. I was a mess."
Such a mess, she says, that several doctors were "afraid to touch me" when she went for test after she felt heaviness in her chest that "felt like I had a ton of bricks" on her heart.
"I was a bad risk," she says matter of factly. "But I guess I had to be scared to death to do something." After her "miracle" doctors did their part, Palace says she was "bound and determined to do what I had to do" - driven by the desire to continue to live along with her loved ones.
Before surgery and rehab, Palace would run out of breath over the easiest task. She took insulin for her diabetes, and she'd get "madder and madder and eat more and more" when people told her she needed to shed some of the 315 pounds on her 5-2 ½ inch frame.
When she started rehab, she could only walk .5 miles an hour for less than two minutes before all but collapsing. "And I couldn't even image using a Stairmaster," she says.
She is
still in rehab, almost eight years later, missing only once this year
when inclement weather kept her put in her Waterford, Michigan home.
She's worked her way up to 2.6 miles an hour on the treadmill. And,
besides using weights and other cardiovascular equipment, she's using
the once dreaded Stairmaster.
"I'm a different person," Palace says. "Friends who I haven't seen in
years don't even recognize me. I got a chance to change my life. Now I
go, go, go. And I have to play bingo.
"I didn't want to die. I'm still not ready."
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