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Jenna Tanner mistook rare ‘widowmaker’ heart attack for flu and just kept cleaning the house until she passed out
A mum survived a “widowmaker” heart attack that she initially dismissed as “flu”. She has since revealed what she “saw” while fighting for her life – and said it was like “floating through space“.
Jenna Tanner, 49, a stay-at-home mum living in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, had been experiencing breathlessness and chest pinching for several days. However, she dismissed the symptoms as possibly the flu, which her children had recently recovered from. This led her to eventually lose consciousness and go into cardiac arrest.
It began a vivid out-of-body experience. The vision – complete with stars and colourful nebula – came during the two hours she lay fighting for her life, after the massive heart attack.
She described being “enveloped in blackness” before floating through what looked like space. “I remember kind of just floating through this space — like a space universe — and I was getting closer to what I would describe as a nebula,” Tanner recalled. “There was a big cloud of colours moving that was changing. Everything was vivid stars. I was just floating peacefully.”
The mum of three, who doctors call a “miracle patient,” suffered what’s known as a “widowmaker” heart attack. It happened when her left anterior descending artery became blocked entirely.
The event, which has a survival rate of just 12% when occurring outside a hospital, happened while she was alone at home after her children had left for school. Tanner and her husband, Ryan, 51, an electrician, share three children: Mazie, 20, Avery, 17, and Brady, 13.
“Sometime after 11am that morning, I texted my husband,” she recalled. “My intention was to text him that I thought I might be sick or coming down with something.”
Instead of seeking medical attention, Tanner focused on cleaning her house, on March 9, 2022. While walking into her home office, she felt her blood pressure drop and sat down on the floor to prevent fainting.
When she regained awareness, Tanner described being “shot back towards my body” through what looked like “a tube of lightning” before seeing her body on the floor and returning to it with “instant pain.” She said: “It felt like an elephant had walked in and sat on my chest, and I knew instantly that I was having a heart attack.”
With her phone in another room, Tanner spent approximately two hours drifting in and out of consciousness. During lucid moments, she reflected on her life in a way that surprised her.
“Not once did I remember or relive any bad parts of life,” she said. “Everything that I thought about was the connections I had made with people or places while I was alive.” She added: “It was just all the good stuff.”
The thought of Brady returning from school to find her dead ultimately motivated Tanner to army-crawl to her phone. After calling her husband and then 911, she managed to unlock her front door before collapsing as first responders arrived.
At the hospital, the gravity of her condition became apparent when medical staff fell silent upon seeing the first image of her heart. Tanner said her cardiologist later told her with tears in his eyes: “In a 20-year career and over 4,000 surgeries, I’ve never seen anything like this. I didn’t even know people could survive this.”
Tanner said: “The fire department actually won an award for how quickly they came and got me to the hospital. I think it was under 13 minutes, which was record time.” She added: “I got to go to their awards banquet the next year for that.” Tanner’s entire left heart had shut down, and doctors still cannot explain how she survived with only the right side functioning. They placed a pump in her heart and inserted a stent in her main artery — a procedure that typically requires bypass surgery.
What is a ‘widowmaker’ heart attack?
A widowmaker heart attack is also referred to as an anterior STEMI or a blockage in the left anterior descending (LAD) artery. It is a critical type of heart attack where a major artery that supplies blood to the heart gets fully blocked. This blockage cuts off oxygen to a large part of the heart muscle, making it extremely dangerous and frequently deadly.
The American Heart Association states that the survival rates for widowmaker heart attacks are quite low, especially when they happen outside of a hospital. Symptoms can include chest pain, shortness of breath, and pain that spreads to the arms, back, or jaw, along with nausea and sweating.
However, some people, particularly women, might have more subtle or unusual symptoms. Getting immediate treatment, like angioplasty or medications to break up the clot, is vital to restore blood flow and reduce heart muscle damage. In a widowmaker heart attack, time is of the essence. Quickly opening the blocked artery is key to boosting survival chances and reducing long-term damage.
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