After she passed out during a dinner with friends, Erica Keshler drove herself to the hospital.
It was November 2022, enough out of the Covid pandemic to get out socially, but the virus was still making its rounds.
At the hospital Keshler learned she didn’t have Covid.
Instead, she came a pacemaker away from death.
Keshler, a Waterville Central School graduate who grew up in Oriskany Falls, carried a heart defect from birth that was hereditary.
Her grandmother, uncle, dad and brother all had it.
Her dad, Dave, former manager of Barker Brook Golf Course, did a lot of research on the disease before his death in Florida from complications following surgery.
When Keshler was in her late 20s, she learned she too had the disease that causes the heart to slow down and eventually fail. Keshler’s condition worsened when she became pregnant and had to stop taking the medication until after son Ciro was born.
For the first 10 years of Ciro’s life, his mom coped with a heart functioning at 15 percent, a percentage that slowly dropped, leading to that November 2022 episode.
Five years before that, in February 2017, Keshler had received a pacemaker, a device that assists the heart beat normally.
Because of her condition, Keshler had been seeing heart specialists in Rochester and Boston.
Massachusetts General ordered Keshler to get to Boston in late 2022.
She went after Thanksgiving, assigned the same cardiologist who had treated her brother Jordan through his heart failure and eventual heart transplant.
Told she would be staying in the hospital for a while, Keshler began undergoing tests to prepare for her own transplant.
Her mom, Judy, stayed with her, while Ciro, a student at Notre Dame school, moved in with his dad to continue school, with an occasional visit to Boston to see his mom.
Doctors worked out a new round of medicines for Keshler, allowing her to go...
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