Mom, 30, has rare postpartum heart attack 2 months after giving birth to twins

Two months after delivering premature twins, a 30-year-old mother of four had a heart attack.

“It was terrifying,” says Ilyana Kokernak, who lives in Plainfield, Conn., with her four children, stepdaughter, and boyfriend ,Frank Miner IV: Carolina, 11, Emma, 6, twins Frank V and Evelyn, 5 months, her boyfriend Frank Miner IV, and stepdaughter Natalie, 11-year-old.

The issues started after the couple’s twins, Frank V and Evelyn, were born April 10 at only 29 weeks’ gestation. Their son weighed 2.4 lbs. and their daughter weighed 2.5 lbs.

“I got to hold Frank right away, but Evelyn was put on a breathing machine — I wasn’t able to hold her,” Kokernak says. “And I only held Frank for a couple of seconds before they took him to the NICU.”

Baby Frank stayed in the hospital 53 days. His sister stayed nearly 60 days.

“The first day I left the hospital without them, I didn’t want to be around anybody,” Kokernak says. “It was just too many people, and none of them were them.”

Frank finally came home from the hospital June 2, a few days later, on the morning of June 5, Kokernak started feeling chest pain. At the time, she was driving her 6-year-old daughter Emma to the school bus stop. Frank was in the back seat.

“I started to feel like I needed to breathe deeper,” she says. When she got to the bus stop, she experienced a gagging sensation, like she needed to vomit.

When the kids got on the bus, she says, “I started feeling worse.”

She called Frank, 32, who was working a delivery shift. “I needed somebody to talk to me,” she says. She felt like she was having a hot flash, but a cold sweat broke out. Her eyes, she says, felt “flashy.”

She asked her boyfriend to stay on the phone with her while she drove home.

When she got home to get her 11-year-old daughter Carolina ready for school, Kokernak couldn’t lift her baby out of his car seat. She woke her daughter and asked for her help. “I couldn’t pick him up,” she says. “My arms felt limp.”

The exhausted mom thought maybe she was dehydrated.

After Carolina went to school, her boyfriend’s mom came and got the baby. Kokernak took a shower and a nap.

“I needed to shake this feeling,” she recalls.

But a week later, after Evelyn came home from the hospital, on June 10, Kokernak experienced the same symptoms.

This time, her boyfriend Frank was at home with her. She started feeling very hot, so she got undressed, grabbed a chair and sat in front of the air conditioner.

“My arms felt tingly, I started to feel gaggy,” she says.

Her boyfriend Googled her symptoms and said she might be having a heart attack.

“I thought that was crazy,” she says.

He took her to a walk-in clinic, where an EKG indicated she might actually be having a STEMI, a heart attack where there’s a complete blockage of one of the coronary arteries.

She was transferred to Hartford Hospital and admitted with acute heart attack symptoms.

At the hospital, after having an angiogram, Kokernak went into cardiac arrest. She later learned what was happening to her. “My heart was tearing,” she says.

The young mother was diagnosed with a spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD).

“Spontaneous coronary artery dissections are a very rare, specific type of coronary problem,” says Dr. Stephanie Saucier, 38, a non-invasive cardiologist and co-director of Women’s Heart Wellness for Hartford Healthcare. “The lining of the artery actually separates.”

It’s different from more common heart attacks caused by plaque or cholesterol buildup that leads to a blockage, she explains.

The exact causes of SCAD are unknown but they tend to occur in younger people without traditional cardiovascular risk factors. And, a recent pregnancy puts people more at risk. “We often see it postpartum,” Saucier says. “But while her pregnancy may have contributed to the condition, it did not cause it.”

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After doctors identified her SCAD diagnosis, Kokernak took a turn for the worse.

“Her heart actually stopped,” Saucier says. “We did CPR and brought her back.”

Kokernak says it was terrifying. “I woke up in the middle of the CPR — I felt all of it, but they couldn’t stop because when they stopped, I wasn’t there,” she says. “I didn’t realize what they were doing was keeping me alive…. It didn’t click.”

Once she had stabilized, stents were put into her left anterior descending artery to open up blood flow, the doctor says.

All she could think about afterward was her kids, and how if she had died, she wouldn’t be there to tell them the bad news and comfort them and make them feel better.

“I didn’t want to be taken away from them,” she says. 

Kokernak spent a week in the hospital, missing both Carolina and Emma’s birthdays, as well as Carolina’s spring concert, where she performed a solo. She also missed her Carolina’s last soccer game of the regular season, and the championship game that followed. And, she missed the kids’ last day of school.

These days, she stays home with the twins who are growing and starting to laugh and smile.

“I almost died,” she says. “I feel really grateful to be here.”