Deanna Brown-Thomas was at her desk at the James Brown Family Foundation in Augusta, Georgia, when her chest began tightening. She was sweating profusely. Feeling the urge to burp, she hustled to the bathroom and splashed water on her face.
She returned to her desk hoping she could push through. She couldn't. The daughter of the legendary Godfather of Soul called Velice Cummings, her friend and sorority sister.
Cummings urged Brown-Thomas to go to the emergency room. "We must see what's going on with your heart," Cummings told her. "You're saying your chest is tight.
We can't play with that." Brown-Thomas gave in. At the hospital, she felt like she was going to pass out while waiting to be treated.
Because of the combination of a rapid heart rate, low oxygen and a troublesome electrocardiogram, doctors rushed Brown-Thomas to the cardiac catheterization lab to take a look inside her heart. The news was good. No arteries were blocked.
However, an ultrasound showed her heart's ability to pump blood to her body – known as ejection fraction – was extremely low. Normal range starts at 50%. Hers was 10%.
She had congestive heart failure. Those three words struck fear in her. "That's what my father died of," she said of James Brown, who passed away on Christmas Day in 2006.
"I started to wonder, 'Am I going to die?'" Brown-Thomas' husband and Cummings were the first to see her in the recovery room. "You need to stay on the good foot," Cummings told Brown-Thomas, invoking the name.
