Ashlee Floyd is following her dream to become a cardiovascular sonographer.
Lessons from the Heart
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SU-Oklahoma City student Ashlee Floyd had high expectations for the school’s Diagnostic Sonography Program and what it would mean for her future. What she didn’t expect was that it would reveal her own life-threatening congenital heart condition. After graduating from high school, Floyd researched her educational options in cardiovascular sonography and chose OSU-OKC based on the program’s stellar reputation and high student success and job placement rates. During her first week in the program, she and a classmate were partnering in a routine practice scanning session when her partner noticed something abnormal in Floyd’s scan. She called the instructors over to take a look.
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PHOTOS / MICHELLE TALAMANTES
BY S A N DY PA N T L I K
Karen Bubb, head of OSU-OKC’s Diagnostic Medical Sonography Department, was one of the instructors who reviewed Floyd’s scan. “On occasion, we will run across a subtle suspected abnormality, and we will typically discuss it with the student and advise them to visit their doctor for followup,” Bubb says. “However, in Ashlee’s case, we realized we needed to handle her situation delicately. First and foremost, we didn’t want her to panic. I gently explained to her that this issue was most likely congenital, meaning she has had it her entire life, so it wasn’t an acute emergency. However, it was something that needed to be addressed and verified by a doctor.” “I remember calling my mom on the way home from class and saying, ‘I think getting into this program was definitely a God thing,’” Floyd says. “At that point, we weren’t thinking it was anything serious.”
Unfortunately, a visit to the cardiologist would prove otherwise. In May 2016, Floyd was diagnosed with a sinus venosus atrial septal defect, or ASD (a hole in the wall of the heart that separates the top two chambers), and partial anomalous pulmonary venous return (two pulmonary veins connected to the heart’s right atrium instead of the left). There is never a good time to receive such a diagnosis, but for Floyd, it was particularly challenging because she was planning for her upcoming July wedding. With the doctor’s OK to wait a few weeks longer, she scheduled open-heart surgery one week after her wedding with hopes she could return to the sonography program for the upcoming fall semester. The four-hour procedure successfully repaired Floyd’s heart and put her on the road to recovery.