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Three-time Olympian Jenny Simpson built her entire life around running — but after a sudden cardiac event two months ago revealed a hidden rare disease and nearly killed her, she is embarking on a new kind of race.
Simpson, 39, had helped a group of girls pace themselves during a milelong run in Raleigh, North Carolina, in June moments before she collapsed. She told CBS News she doesn’t remember anything that happened that day. But Ivy and Joey Pointer will never forget it.
Joey Pointer is the CEO of the company Fleet Feet, which hired Simpson as its chief running officer earlier this year. Ivy is a pediatric intensive care unit physician. The pair aren’t just Simpson’s co-workers and friends: They are also the parents of a child with a congenital heart disease, so they carry an automated external defibrillator. That meant when Simpson collapsed, they had all the tools necessary to rush to her side.
“When I looked over from afar, I knew that something was very, very wrong,” Ivy told CBS News. “So I told Joey to grab an AED and ran over and got there. … I just remember thinking like, ‘This can’t happen right now. Like we have a lot happening soon and that this is not going to happen right now. You are going to fight. You’re going to hold on. You have to wake up.’ And I just kept saying her name and kind of screaming her name, honestly.”
Simpson, a bronze medalist in the 1,500 meters at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, had spent the last year on a 50-state running tour with her husband Jason, joining local groups in scenic, far-flung places. If she had experienced a cardiac event without lifesaving resources nearby, her story might have had a different ending.
“It means to me that there was a God present in all of this, my family doesn’t have a history of heart conditions,” Simpson said. “I don’t know that a lot of the time in my life I’m around people that know how to intervene when there is a heart condition. And it’s like I got plucked out of my home and put into this family.”
Ivy and other bystanders performed CPR until first responders arrived and rushed Simpson to an area hospital. She suffered a second cardiac arrest and was then transferred to Duke University Medical Center. Her husband flew to be by her side as she spent days on life support. Waking up was unlike anything she had ever experienced, she said.
“I’ve spent so much of my life and my career bringing people joy, and to wake up and see that the room was full of heaviness and sorrow — that was really hard,” Simpson said.
Simpson was diagnosed with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, a rare congenital heart condition where the heart repairs damage with tissue that doesn’t properly conduct electricity in the right ventricle. Running doesn’t cause the condition, but it did eventually reveal it.
“When my heart was pumping blood and was dilated, at some point in my life, it was very likely the electricity was going to turn off, and that’s what happened,” Simpson said. “[My cardiologist] said, ‘You thought you trained your whole life for the Olympics, but you were really training your whole life for June 16.’ I trained my whole life for that day — and I won.”
Simpson had a defibrillator and pacemaker implanted, and regularly sees her cardiologist, who she called her “favorite person in the world.” But still, she’ll never be able to run again. She’s still not sure what comes next, but she said her husband and the Pointers have given her space and encouragement as she figures that out.
Simpson said on Instagram she is recovering at home in Colorado and will continue to work at Fleet Feet. There’s still “a lot to learn about what my recovery will look like over time,” she wrote, but she’s “not afraid of what comes next because I know I’m not alone.”
Simpson told CBS News she is focused on maintaining a positive mindset as she recovers.
“To think that the way I showed up as a person and as a woman with my last mile was in community, taking young girls around the track, I’m really proud of that,” Simpson said. “That’s what I’m grateful for. That’s what I want to remember.”
