 I'd like to introduce you to my friend and patient. Teri and I have had quite a journey together with her health care and I wanted her to come and talk to y'all a little bit about her story, which is, it's been quite a journey. You know I spend a lot of time talking to patients about food and obesity, but that actually wasn't your problem. You had gained a lot of weight, but you had something called anisarca. You had fluid up to your armpits when I first met you. That wasn't just too many cheeseburgers because you'd always had a very healthy lifestyle. Right. I really never stopped working in my career, so I was doing a P.R.E. in part time at the University of Houston Health Center there and it was maybe two or three days a month. But I noticed all of a sudden that I normally can, is it say, clean a house in thirty-five minutes, put dinner on, and the time you get there in less than forty-five minutes, I'm ready. I was slowing. I wasn't as sharp and perky as I normally was. That was my wake-up call and as we talked to friends and I, oh, let's take this vitamin, you need to take vitamins. And finally I said, mm-mm, that's not it. I stated, and my message to all women is to know your body and also get another opinion because that was the key, that was the driving factor, that I knew I wasn't eating a lot to gain all that weight. I wasn't gorging a lot of unhealthy foods for me to really experience what I call constipation and elimination of fluids. And those were some factors that I kept looking at to see what was going on. You had something that turned out to be very unusual and I think that was one of the confusing issues in you getting a diagnosis and you ended up with pulmonary hypertension due to all of these chronic blood clots in your lung. And because of that, the right side of your heart, which takes the fluid out of your body, was failing when I met you. And I think it's much more difficult if you have something unusual because you don't fit into the normal algorithms that physicians normally think about to take care of the majority of patients. And that's why your case, I believe, was confusing. They knew that you had right heart failure but they had no idea why. Exactly. And then it was, and then we had to work backwards and really when you gave me your history that you'd been working full time and had been perfectly fine up until that end of 2011, that's what made me start thinking about this more unusual diagnosis. Because that's a very big surgery that you had actually. How many hours did they operate? They said 12. Okay. And the name of your surgery is called a thromboendarterectomy. And this is a very delicate, exacting surgery where they dissect out all of this organized clot into the smallest bits of your pulmonary vasculature that they can access. Tell me a little bit about, I know that I've sent you to cardiac rehab and that's been quite a journey as well to get your strength back. Yes. Cardiac rehab has really been very encouraging. I attend three days a week and the latest there work with me very closely in that we do my blood pressure and we also do my weight and then we do the treadmill and the bicycle and now we're doing what I call strength training exercises. Right. So of course this week I had moved up to the three pound weights. Prior to that I was doing two pounds. Some really on the road, as I say, I'm really on the way. I can do the bicycle and treadmill for 20 minutes and that's working out very well. I'm not sure you could get out of bed at that point. I could get out of bed with a little help. And into a chair right next to the bed. Exactly. That was about it. That was it. So this is really great, 20 minutes on the bike and lifting weights. That's pretty awesome. The ladies in the rehab are really proud of me. If you were a woman who didn't have medical friends, what would be some other areas that we could suggest that they get medical information? Well of course the library, you read a lot, you attend health fairs, okay. In my case, that Go Red for Women Luncheon where you just spoke with, that really opens the doors to realize that we women do not have the same symptoms as the average heart patient, the male heart patient. Right. I'm glad you're better. I feel a whole lot better. Oh yeah, oh yeah, me too, me too. I could even keep my grandbaby who's three months. I got a few gray hairs over that. Yeah. But it worked out.