When Garret Beckner was 37 years old, he started having chest pains.
“I remember going to the doctor and getting that checked out,” Beckner said. “They said, ‘Hey, you're almost 40, type 2 diabetic, with a sedentary office job. Let's check your heart out.’”
At the time, Beckner was a pretty typical American office worker, with his "butt glued in a chair" at least eight hours a day. He hiked some on weekends with his wife and baby daughter, and his type 2 diabetes was well controlled, but, he did do a whole lot of sitting around.
“So they gave me the stress test,” Beckner said. “They gave me all the different diagnostics, and looked at my heart. I had no issues.”
Beckner said his heart was declared healthy, and he was then referred gastroenterologist who diagnosed him with acid reflux.
“So at least as far back as 2017 I know that my heart was in good condition” Beckner said.
He had no reason to believe that had changed when 2020 rolled around, and a novel coronavirus moved into town.
The Beckners had what he describes as a strong, reinforced bubble that included other COVID-conscious people. Their daughter went to daycare, but it was an in-home situation with other people in their bubble.
They made it through the first year of brutal COVID waves unscathed. But the coronavirus caught up with them eventually.
“We'd moved to San Antonio in October of 2021. We wanted to be closer to family. We were kind of chasing a dream,” Beckner said. “We couldn't find an in-home daycare, so we had to bring our daughter to one of those places that’s got multiple rooms, multiple classes.”
Within a week, Beckner said, his daughter had brought COVID home. All three of them got sick. His daughter shook it off quickly. His wife got quite ill but then recovered quickly and fully.
For Beckner, it was not like that at all. He didn’t recover quickly. In fact, he said, he hasn’t recovered at all. Beckner developed long COVID, and while trying to uncover the causes of his multiple, debilitating symptoms, his doctor sent him to a cardiologist.
“They said we'll do the full workup, kind of similar to what I'd had done years prior,” Beckner said. “Only this time, I couldn't make it through the stress test. I couldn't even get through it.”
Beckner was quickly scheduled for an angiogram, a test that would look at his coronary blood vessels to see if they were blocked. He was sedated for the procedure, and when he woke up, the person who performed the test was by his side.
“I just remember seeing his face as soon as I woke up,” Beckner said. “He was like, ‘you have three clogged arteries. We're gonna have to get you to a specialist.”
But wait, Beckner thought, he was only 42, and when he had that cardiac workup back in 2017 he got a clean bill of health. This couldn’t be right. But it was.
“Literally seven days after that consult, I was in surgery” Beckner said. “I had three arteries on the left side that were basically completely blocked, and if they didn't get me into surgery for bypass…inevitable heart attack, it was a matter of time.”
His heart had been a ticking time bomb.
And Beckner is not alone. Research beginning early in the pandemic and continuing to today has consistently found that for at least a year after being infected with the COVID virus, people may be at increased risk of developing a new heart-related problem. Those problems can range from blood clots to arrythmias to a sudden, catastrophic heart attack.
What’s going on? Researchers are slowly beginning to tease that out, and the answer may come down to a single word. Inflammation.
In this episode of Petrie Dish, Bonnie talked with Dr. Dara Lee Lewis, a Harvard Medical School instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s, and director of noninvasive testing and co-director of the Women’s Cardiology Program at the Lown Cardiology Group in Boston.
