Susan Koeppen was two hours into a conference call while working from her home in Kirkland, Washington, when she started feeling pain in her left shoulder blade. Figuring it was from being idle for so long, she went from sitting to standing. The pain eased a bit.
When the call ended, she went upstairs to grab something for lunch. That's when she was hit with an overwhelming sense of nausea. Her husband, Rob Koeppen, was about to leave the house.
"I'm really not feeling well," Susan said. "Can you stick around?" "Sure," Rob responded, even though he didn't sense anything seriously wrong with her. Susan laid down on her bed to see if that would help.
Doing so only made her shoulder pain and nausea worse. "Could this be COVID-19?" Susan thought. She went into the bathroom to grab an at-home COVID test.
It came back negative. As she continued to feel worse, she kept trying to figure out the source of her discomfort. Then she remembered something: When her father experienced a heart attack, he couldn't articulate what exactly was wrong, just that he felt terrible.
She needed to get to the emergency room. While waiting to get treated, Susan's mind flashed forward. Fearing the worst, she realized she hadn't properly prepared her family for life without her.
For instance, the normally organized then-63-year-old hadn't kept a log of passwords to important accounts. She began jotting them down. When Susan finally got into a room, her blood was drawn.
About five minutes later, a doctor .