It all started with a cheeseburger, Sarah Casalan Bittle, 49, tells TODAY.com.
Casalan Bittle, President of the UPS Store, Inc. and a single mom of two boys, made burgers for dinner one evening in July 2022 while her mother was visiting town.
The next evening, she was surprised to find that she felt indigestion, which she assumed must have been the burger. “I have an iron stomach, so I don’t really get indigestion,” says Casalan Bittle, who lives in Northbrook, Illinois. Figuring it wasn’t too serious, she went on with her evening like normal.
She tucked her kids into bed and then went to sleep, but woke up a few hours later with nausea. “I woke up thinking, ‘Let’s finally get this burger thing over with. If I’m going to be sick, fine. Then we’ll get better,'” she recalls. But Casalan Bittle never vomited.
“I laid down on the bathroom floor and progressively felt more nauseous and then a little sweaty,” she says. For about 90 minutes she sat there, and “nothing was happening, but I was feeling just gross,” she says.
She decided to try to take a shower, but she simply couldn’t get up. “I just didn’t have the strength or the coordination to get off of the floor,” Casalan Bittle says.
That’s when she started to panic.
She forced herself to stand up, which set off a wave of chest discomfort and shortness of breath. But she was able to make it to her mother to ask for help before becoming unconscious for about five minutes.
Once in an ambulance, Casalan Bittle recalls coming in and out of consciousness. “The last thing I remember — I don’t recommend it — was being defibrillated,” she says. “I remember being electrocuted alive.”
She was rushed to a local hospital where she and her family received the startling news that Casalan Bittle was having a heart attack.
Casalan Bittle went into cardiac arrest at the hospital
At the time, Casalan Bittle was 47 and had no known health conditions. She was active, regularly working out with her Peloton bike and she even…
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