Heart Talk with Hillary

In today’s episode you’ll get to hear from Fano and Francesca, the proud parents of a beautiful 4yr old girl named, Sienna. Sienna was born with HLHS which stands for Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. HLHS causes the left side of the heart to be underdeveloped. Thankfully it has a good prognosis with the help of multiple surgeries including an open heart surgery that usually occurs when a baby is just a few days old. Sienna was doin...

If you follow me on instagram then you know how special this episode is. Back in June of this year a friend of mine had sent me a post on instagram about a little 3 year old boy named Tru who was on vacation in Hawaii and suddenly became very ill. It turned out that he was fighting acute viral myocarditis. I immediately began praying for this little boy and his entire family. I shared every update I saw over the course of the next ...

In today’s episode you get to meet Jenna Tanner a wife and Mom of 3 from Oklahoma. Jenna shares her story of surviving a sudden and major heart attack while home alone in 2022. In our conversation Jenna shares about her subtle symptoms leading up to the heart attack and how easy it is as women to disregard these symptoms. We discuss the disparity of information on female heart attack symptoms as opposed to male’s. She also shares a...

In this episode you get to meet my friend, Michelle. I was so encouraged after this conversation. Michelle’s cardiac arrest happened in 2011 and yet she’s still out here sharing and bringing awareness to what happened to her. I can only hope that I’ll be doing the same in another decade or so.

Michelle's story is one of incredible resilience while enduring many trials. In 2011 while in her early 30’s, Michelle was a wife and yo...

Abiomed has been such a wonderful resource for me, connecting me to so many people all over the world who have experienced heart failure. Today, I get to introduce you to Franzi. She lives in Germany which also happens to be where Thorstein Seiss, the inventor of the Impella lives and is from. Franzi shares her story about how coming down with the common cold led her on a scary years long journey of battling heart failure. She went...

I am so excited for you all to hear today’s episode. This conversation is definitely the most I’ve ever laughed while discussing heart failure. Chavez has the most infectious and positive personality and he just radiates joy. 

Today he shares his story of battling viral myocarditis at 29 years old after having recovered from covid. We talk about everything from law school to food blogging to heart failure and hospitals. Chavez graci...

Welcome back to the podcast. In this episode I interviewed my friend, Cheyenne. I first heard about Cheyenne through a friend whose sister was being treated for acute viral myocarditis at Providence St.Vincent’s just like I had been. My friend told me there was this girl who was also at St.Vincent’s due to heart failure but she had also just given birth. I remember praying for Cheyenne as I heard bits and pieces about her story but...

On today’s episode you will get to hear from my friend Marcie Wastewater. She is a beautiful, healthy, super active wife and mom of 2. She is going to share with you her story of surviving SCAD (S-C-A-D) which stands for Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection. It’s as scary as it sounds and it has also been called the “healthy woman’s heart attack”. I can’t wait for you to hear how proactive and intuitive Marcie was with her initia...

In this episode you get to meet my friend, Jessica Grib. Jessica is a peripartum cardiomyopathy and paraganglioma survivor and advocate. In this episode she shares her story about the birth of her 2nd born child in 2016 and how she experienced heart failure and nearly died in the recovery room after delivery. Jessica later learned that she had a tumor called a paraganglioma that was the actual cause of her heart failure after givin...

In this episode you get to meet my friend, Lauren Delaney. Lauren and I met through social media and as wild as it sounds we also had the exact same team of cardiologists. Lauren lives about an hour north of me and super close to Providence St. Vincent's Hospital. Today she's sharing her heart failure and heart transplant story with you all. I'm so grateful for her willingness to share when she is only just shy of 6-...

In this episode, you get to meet my friends Bobby and Carly Goines. Abiomed's Patient Advocacy program connected Bobby and I in the Spring of 2022 a few months after we had both recovered from Acute Viral Myocarditis. Our stories are eerily similar which has created a lifetime bond for our two families. We got to meet in person last February and I am really excited for you all to hear his story. We talk about his initial sympt...

In this episode my husband and I walk you through the remainder of my hospitalization. From arriving at the second hospital while bleeding out in the ambulance all the way to discharging a few weeks later and going home. We did our best to summarize a 20-day hospitalization in two 1-hour episodes. There is certainly a whole lot more that could be said here and we could spend hours just on a single topic like recovery, isolation or ...

For the very first episode of Heart to Heart I thought it would be helpful as the host to share my own experience with heart failure. I'm excited to also have my husband, Daniel along for this 2-part episode sharing his own perspective. In the first 48 hours of my hospitalization I was in and out of consciousness and Daniel was there with me. Soon after we were separated while I was put in Covid isolation. Daniel's perspe...