2025 Go Red for Women Class of Survivors: Taelur Littlejohn
Taelur Littlejohn had three heart attacks after the birth of her third son. She now knows heart disease is the No. 1 killer of new moms and shares her story so other women know too.
Taelur Littlejohn had a healthy pregnancy with her third son. Her labor was strenuous, but nothing about her delivery seemed out of the ordinary to the doctors. The day she got home, a striking pain slammed Taelur in the chest when she reached to pick up her newborn. The 28-year-old mother screamed for her 9-year-old son to call 911. He dialed the number and handed her the phone.
“Please get here, please get here. I feel like I can't breathe,” Taelur said. “I can't die here with my kids by myself.”
She thought she was having a heart attack but was initially told she was too young for that to be the case.
When paramedics arrived, they took an electrical reading of Taelur’s heart and rushed her to the emergency room. The medical team determined she had a heart attack, and a surgeon inserted a balloon pump to try to take stress off her heart. Taelur had a second heart attack in intensive care. As her heart grew weaker, the cardiologist consulted with other specialists around the country and recommended transferring Taelur to a heart hospital in Dallas about 20 miles away.
Shortly after arriving, Taelur was having emergency open-heart surgery and needed a triple bypass. Three of her main arteries ripped apart in a rare type of heart attack called spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD. Her other artery was almost completely closed as well.
The last thing Taelur remembered was a nurse trying to draw blood and feeling an incredible pain in her chest.
“I blacked out after that,” Taelur said. “The next thing I’m waking up two weeks later because they had me in an induced coma. I had tubes coming out of my throat, my chest glued together, tubes in my stomach, and, I’m like, ‘What happened?’”
She was hospitalized for three months in extreme heart failure and needed life support. They told Taelur’s mother they didn’t know if she would make it. Taelur signed papers giving her mother power of attorney.
She pulled through with lots of prayer and the desire not to leave her sons without a mother.
Because children were not allowed in the ICU, Taelur made do with Facetime calls, pictures and talks on the phone. She wondered if her newborn would remember her. Eventually, the doctor consented to a visit from her boys.
“I truly feel like in my heart, once I was able to lock my eyes on them physically and see them and hug them and really hold my baby for the first time, I felt like that gave me a lot of strength inside,” Taelur said. “I just was like, ‘I got to get out of here. I’m ready to get home.’”
When she left the hospital in March 2022, Taelur had to wear a defibrillator vest that monitored her heart and would shock it into a normal rhythm, if necessary. She no longer needs it.
Taelur, now 31, takes several medications to strengthen her heart, which is functioning in the near-normal range. She is no longer out of breath after a minute on the treadmill and can go for a half-hour. She is grateful to do little things like run after her 2-year-old, clean house or get groceries by herself.
Before her heart attack, Taelur had never heard of SCAD. She Googled it at the hospital. She connected with other SCAD survivors in a Facebook group. She wondered what she did wrong. She now understands that while SCAD is spontaneous, pregnancy also can put a lot of stress on the heart.
Along the way, she learned that heart disease is the No. 1 killer of new moms. And Black women are more likely to develop pregnancy-related cardiovascular problems than other women.
“Now that this has happened to me, I've done a lot of research, and I do know that there's a high mortality rate in Black women,” Taelur said. “America right now is in an actual maternal health crisis.”
Her advice to other pregnant women is to advocate for yourself and ask lots of questions.
“If you're not comfortable with something, speak up for yourself. Even get a second opinion if you feel the need to,” she said. “Don't take ‘no’ for an answer.”
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