LOUISVILLE, Ky. — American Heart Month is a great time for people to focus on their cardiovascular health, and one Kentucky nurse is doing that not only for herself, but others born like her.
Ashley Eastman was born with a bicuspid aortic valve, meaning it had two flaps instead of three.
Now, she’s helping babies born with a heart defect like she was. She’s a single ventricle nurse clinician at Norton Children’s Heart Institute in Louisville.
She works with the families of patients who need heart surgery within a few days of birth and a second surgery several weeks later. In the time between surgeries, Eastman is the go-to person for those families.
She and her teammates are on-call 24 hours a day, ready to help. They track the patients’ stats like heart rate and oxygen uploaded by their parents daily and look for any signs the babies might need to be hospitalized or require some extra medical treatment.
Because Eastman grew up regularly seeing doctors for her heart condition, her work is more than just a job to her.
“I knew at a young age that I wanted to do something medical. I knew I wanted to do something with hearts, because I just had a kind of natural base from going to my appointments and learning about myself,” she said. “That’s when I kind of grew that knowledge and that passion.”
After her first heart surgery at age 15, Eastman knew nursing would be a great way to use that passion. She still keeps a photo of the nurses who helped her through that time.
“It was just all very inspiring for me at that age because they knew so much, and they were so great at what they were doing with their attitude, and it made me feel really good and uplifted and that everything was going to be okay,” Eastman said. “I’m kind of on both sides of the stethoscope now, and I try to, like, remember how they treated me.”
Eastman underwent another surgery in 2019—the Ross Procedure. It was a risky surgery that ultimately paid off, clearing her to become pregnant with her now six-month-old son, Theodore.
She made it through a high-risk pregnancy, and even with a higher chance of having a heart defect himself, little Teddy was born perfectly healthy.
As a new mother, Eastman says she can relate even better to the family she helps, now.
“I don’t always like, advertise, you know, ‘Hey, I’m a congenital heart patient, too.’ But there are those opportunities that come up,” she explained. “I’ll see parents that are really worried, and I’ll have dads be like, ‘You know, I’m really worried about her scar. Like, is this going to affect her later in life? Is she going to like, be insecure from that?’ And then I’m like, ‘You know, listen, I’ve had two of these, and it’s almost something that’s like a battle wound.’”
It’s a battle Eastman wants parents to know their little ones can overcome.
“They see me as like, someone who’s capable and smart, and you know, helping other people, and I think that’s inspiring for them,” she said. “They see like, OK, my child can go on and integrate into the real world and do good things.”
Eastman’s hope is that each one of her patients will be better and stronger because of her journey, just like she is.
Eastman is part of an entire team of medical professionals at Norton Children’s that works with families from the time a pregnant mother is fetally diagnosed through her baby’s heart surgeries.