She thought it was the stairs

When Deb Hoekstra began avoiding stairs in the fall of 2020, she didn’t think she was facing a medical emergency. She thought she was being sensible.

“I looked at the half-flight of stairs into my office and thought, I’ll go around — no stairs,” Deb recalls. “That wasn’t like me at all.”

Within days, even climbing the stairs at home left her gasping for air. Her heart rate surged. Her blood pressure spiked. “Every time I came up the stairs, I would be completely out of breath,” she says. “Very uncharacteristic.” Because it was the height of COVID, the assumption was obvious — but Deb had no other symptoms. She knew something wasn’t right.

On a Wednesday morning, drawing on years of experience supporting loved ones through illness, Deb packed a bag. She made it halfway down the stairs before stopping. “I said, Call 911.”

At the hospital, Deb was taken straight in. Her oxygen levels were dangerously low. Initial treatments didn’t help. A CT scan finally revealed the cause: her lungs were filled with blood clots. “My heart was fine,” Deb says. “But my lungs were completely full.” She spent 11 days on oxygen, unable to move even short distances without her levels crashing.

Although the clots were expected to resolve, they didn’t. Over time, follow-up scans revealed something far more serious: chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH), a rare and potentially fatal condition. “After the surgery, I asked bluntly, Was I living on borrowed time?” Deb says. “They said yes — probably one to two years.”

That diagnosis brought Deb to the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, where a newly trained, highly specialized team was beginning to perform a complex lung surgery previously available only out of province. “If they hadn’t been able to do it here,” Deb says, “I would have been flown to Toronto — with no guarantees.”

In June 2025, Deb became the third patient in Edmonton to undergo a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy — an eight-and-a-half-hour surgery involving deep hypothermia and a heart-lung bypass machine. The risk was real. But so was the alternative.

Before surgery, Deb’s condition was worsening rapidly. “Stairs were horrible,” she says. “I sounded like a freight train.” Six months later, recovery is still underway — but her future is no longer measured in borrowed time.

“I wouldn’t be here without this team,” Deb says.

Because advanced, donor-supported care was available close to home, Deb Hoekstra is breathing easier — and living — today.