Quick journey toward death brought focus to young life
The 26-year-old Lincoln man had worked a triple shift Aug. 23 at his job as a Cornhusker Marriott banquet manager.
He got home around 11:45 p.m. and sat down with a coworker to drink a beer. He had barely taken a sip, when the chest pain took hold.
Marcus Mason’s worst nightmare — the same one that killed his uncle —was beginning.
Mason knew the genetic disorder he had inherited from his mom’s side of the family could have life-threatening complications — someday.
His uncle, Phil Kammerlohr, a Lutheran minister in Beatrice, died from the most serious one: the inner lining of his aorta split causing him to bleed to death in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes.
On a youth retreat in Aurora, he had leaned forward into his hands at a lunch table, saying he had a sharp pain in his back. He died minutes later.
Mason thought his own body was handling Marfan syndrome, a condition that weakens the body’s connective tissue, fairly well.
The syndrome affects half of his family — two of his four sisters, his mother, and now his daughter, Kyra, who is 5. His grandfather, former Nebraska assistant attorney general Mel Kammerlohr, also had Marfan syndrome and died at age 64 of congestive heart failure.
Mason’s doctors had warned him all his life about the danger of a heart aneurysm, caused by a weakening of the heart’s connective tissue. All through his childhood he’d had regular checkups to monitor his heart, eyes, lungs and joints.
When Mason became an adult, and no longer had health insurance, he stopped the checkups for a while. It cost $1,500 to have an echocardiogram, a test that uses sound waves to create a moving picture of his heart.
Before Aug. 23,his last one had been five years ago.
“From 1993 to 2003, my echos were great,” he said. “I thought, maybe my heart problem isn’t as serious as everyone made it sound my whole life.”
He had played sports and had never had high blood pressure. Seven times his lung has collapsed, but four of those times it reinflated without hospitalization, after a couple hours of rest.
Since three-fourths of aortic dissections occur after age 40, he thought he would start monitoring it more closely when he hit 30.
For at least a while after high school, he slipped into a “bad lifestyle,” he admitted. But his 2003 checkup indicated no stretching of his aorta. He thought he was OK.
The night of Aug. 23, as the crushing pain around his collarbone intensified, Mason’s eyesight also left. He knew he needed to get to a hospital.
His girlfriend drove him to BryanLGH Medical Center West.
An X-ray didn’t reveal the problem. It took several hours, and his mother Corinne coming to the emergency room, to convince someone to do an echocardiogram, he said.
He didn’t yet have his Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance card, even though he had recently signed up for it at work, he said.
It was getting close to 4:30 a.m., as he remembers, when tests showed his heart was dissecting.
Nurses rushed him to a waiting ambulance, and they raced to BryanLGH East, arriving as the 5 o’clock hour approached.
As he lay in an emergency department bed, he remembers hearing a nurse tell others, This kid is dying, let his family come back.
Another nurse told the family, If you believe in God, start praying now.
“I felt like, this is it,” he said.
Cardiovascular surgeon Ed Raines and his team were called to BryanLGH in the dark of a Sunday morning.
In the operating room, Raines replaced a section of Mason’s aorta with a high-tech woven dacron tubing that eventually will fuse with the large artery.
Raines has done six of these operations in the past couple of months — at least two of them as emergency surgeries, the others preventive.
Without that vital four-hour surgery, he said, Mason’s aorta would have torn open, causing him to bleed to death.
As it was, at least one of the three layers split to his groin. The unrepaired area away from the heart eventually will heal.
Actor John Ritter died in 2003 in a matter of hours when his dissection was misdiagnosed as a heart attack.
Generally, Raines repairs two or three aortic dissections a year and does 10 to 15 elective surgeries to prevent dissections.
Dissections usually occur as a result of high blood pressure, genetic connective tissue syndromes or injury.
“I’m glad he got to us and we got him fixed,” Raines said. “He should do very well.”
Mason started cardiac rehabilitation Sept. 21. He hopes to go back to work the beginning of next month.
Even with insurance, he has major medical bills. The hospital bill alone was slightly more than $86,000, not including doctors fees and other miscellaneous charges.
His church will hold a benefit for him Saturday to help with the medical bills.
He was humbled, he said, so many came to see him in the hospital, to say they were rooting for him.
The ordeal has changed him.
“The biggest thing about the whole experience is I would not have been happy with the life I left behind,” he said.
After high school, he had gotten sidetracked. Now he wants to do something with his life he can be proud of, he said.
“A lot of people don’t get this second chance,” he said. “I’m excited to see what I can do now.”
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
He got home around 11:45 p.m. and sat down with a coworker to drink a beer. He had barely taken a sip, when the chest pain took hold.
Marcus Mason’s worst nightmare — the same one that killed his uncle —was beginning.
Mason knew the genetic disorder he had inherited from his mom’s side of the family could have life-threatening complications — someday.
His uncle, Phil Kammerlohr, a Lutheran minister in Beatrice, died from the most serious one: the inner lining of his aorta split causing him to bleed to death in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes.
On a youth retreat in Aurora, he had leaned forward into his hands at a lunch table, saying he had a sharp pain in his back. He died minutes later.
Mason thought his own body was handling Marfan syndrome, a condition that weakens the body’s connective tissue, fairly well.
The syndrome affects half of his family — two of his four sisters, his mother, and now his daughter, Kyra, who is 5. His grandfather, former Nebraska assistant attorney general Mel Kammerlohr, also had Marfan syndrome and died at age 64 of congestive heart failure.
Mason’s doctors had warned him all his life about the danger of a heart aneurysm, caused by a weakening of the heart’s connective tissue. All through his childhood he’d had regular checkups to monitor his heart, eyes, lungs and joints.
When Mason became an adult, and no longer had health insurance, he stopped the checkups for a while. It cost $1,500 to have an echocardiogram, a test that uses sound waves to create a moving picture of his heart.
Before Aug. 23,his last one had been five years ago.
“From 1993 to 2003, my echos were great,” he said. “I thought, maybe my heart problem isn’t as serious as everyone made it sound my whole life.”
He had played sports and had never had high blood pressure. Seven times his lung has collapsed, but four of those times it reinflated without hospitalization, after a couple hours of rest.
Since three-fourths of aortic dissections occur after age 40, he thought he would start monitoring it more closely when he hit 30.
For at least a while after high school, he slipped into a “bad lifestyle,” he admitted. But his 2003 checkup indicated no stretching of his aorta. He thought he was OK.
The night of Aug. 23, as the crushing pain around his collarbone intensified, Mason’s eyesight also left. He knew he needed to get to a hospital.
His girlfriend drove him to BryanLGH Medical Center West.
An X-ray didn’t reveal the problem. It took several hours, and his mother Corinne coming to the emergency room, to convince someone to do an echocardiogram, he said.
He didn’t yet have his Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance card, even though he had recently signed up for it at work, he said.
It was getting close to 4:30 a.m., as he remembers, when tests showed his heart was dissecting.
Nurses rushed him to a waiting ambulance, and they raced to BryanLGH East, arriving as the 5 o’clock hour approached.
As he lay in an emergency department bed, he remembers hearing a nurse tell others, This kid is dying, let his family come back.
Another nurse told the family, If you believe in God, start praying now.
“I felt like, this is it,” he said.
Cardiovascular surgeon Ed Raines and his team were called to BryanLGH in the dark of a Sunday morning.
In the operating room, Raines replaced a section of Mason’s aorta with a high-tech woven dacron tubing that eventually will fuse with the large artery.
Raines has done six of these operations in the past couple of months — at least two of them as emergency surgeries, the others preventive.
Without that vital four-hour surgery, he said, Mason’s aorta would have torn open, causing him to bleed to death.
As it was, at least one of the three layers split to his groin. The unrepaired area away from the heart eventually will heal.
Actor John Ritter died in 2003 in a matter of hours when his dissection was misdiagnosed as a heart attack.
Generally, Raines repairs two or three aortic dissections a year and does 10 to 15 elective surgeries to prevent dissections.
Dissections usually occur as a result of high blood pressure, genetic connective tissue syndromes or injury.
“I’m glad he got to us and we got him fixed,” Raines said. “He should do very well.”
Mason started cardiac rehabilitation Sept. 21. He hopes to go back to work the beginning of next month.
Even with insurance, he has major medical bills. The hospital bill alone was slightly more than $86,000, not including doctors fees and other miscellaneous charges.
His church will hold a benefit for him Saturday to help with the medical bills.
He was humbled, he said, so many came to see him in the hospital, to say they were rooting for him.
The ordeal has changed him.
“The biggest thing about the whole experience is I would not have been happy with the life I left behind,” he said.
After high school, he had gotten sidetracked. Now he wants to do something with his life he can be proud of, he said.
“A lot of people don’t get this second chance,” he said. “I’m excited to see what I can do now.”
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
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