Former Edenton resident Suzanne Knighton, the stepdaughter of retired Edenton Town Manager Anne Marie Knighton, has launched a successful podcast aimed at open-heart surgery patients.
Knighton grew up in Edenton but left the area when she was 16. Knighton hopes to inspire and encourage patients undergoing the lifesaving but life-changing surgery through her blogs.
Knighton, a K-12 educator and resident of Victor, Idaho, was an avid ski instructor and backpacker until the day her own heart let her down. She was mountain biking in eastern Idaho with her husband when she began to feel the symptoms but initially dismissed them.
How could she be having a heart attack? Not her. She was too physically fit to have heart disease. But she decided to come off the mountain and get checked, a fortunate decision.
“I said, there’s no way I’m having a heart attack. I’m a professional skier. It just made no sense,” she said of that moment on the mountain.
But the tests came back with strange results. After a battery of further tests, Knighton’s doctors came up with a diagnosis she’d never heard of: myocardial bridging. Knighton had a congenital heart defect that allowed the blood vessels of her heart to submerge into the heart muscle. That meant that those vital veins and arteries were squeezed as she matured, reducing her blood flow.
The result was as if she’d spent her life eating bacon double cheeseburgers. The blood supply to her heart was constricted just as surely as if her vessels were blocked by cholesterol plaque.
The treatment, performed in 2021, was a radical and rare surgery called myocardial unroofing. Doctors scraped away the surface heart muscle, freeing up the blood vessels and restoring the blood flow.
She was cured. Well, mostly.
“A lot of times, athletes with myocardial bridging don’t survive the heart attack, so it’s incredibly special that I’m here today,” Knighton said.
This was all during the COVID-19 epidemic, but the surgery needed to be performed immediately. She recovered, but her experiences doing that would reshape her life.
Knight was never going to be the athlete she used to be. She does not climb dangerous rock faces or ski to the point of exhaustion. She had to be careful about overtaxing herself, which was difficult for an athlete who always enjoyed pushing her limits.
Through the painful process of readjustment to a new normal, Knighton soon realized that every open-heart patient must come to terms with life-changing realizations and adjustments.
For some, there is knowing that life has an end, and that they’ve nearly reached the end of theirs. The nature of open heart surgery intertwines life and death. Doctors must stop a patient’s heart and then hope to restart it. For others, especially those who face more severe restrictions than Knighton did, the realization is that life can be unfair. There is no returning to what once was.
Knighton was able to thrive after open heart surgery, so she decided to give back to other patients who found themselves going through the same thing. She wanted to teach others to what she refers as “living life wide open.”
Today, she hosts the Heart Chamber Podcast, a program that brings together heart patients, medical professionals, and others who can help them navigate the healing process after open heart surgery.
She’s also given a Ted X talk, “Practicing Dying for Living.” That talk, which explains the lessons she learned and the philosophy that emerged from her experience, is available on YouTube.
Knighton goes by the name “Boots” in her podcasts and talks. Boots is her legal middle name. She was named for her grandfather, for whom it was a nickname. He earned it because he never wore anything but his boots. Knighton honors his memory by using it.
Though her podcast covers a wide range of issues related to recovery from open heart surgery, Knighton said she preaches one very basic truth.
“You deserve to thrive,” she said. “My podcast elevates other people’s stories. It gives people a sense of hope and gives them other ways to think about heart surgery than what Western medicine is telling them. I wasn’t told about the importance of a heart-healthy diet. Being female, I was not referred to cardiac rehab, and I should have been. My surgeon just told me to go and live my best life. … I needed more guidance.”
Knighton holds a master’s degree in curriculum and an undergraduate biology degree. She has teaching experience in mathematics, elementary reading, and college-level ecology.
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