Heart Attacks: Are You at Risk?

Posted on February 20, 2004 in Appeals and Goodwill College Coronary

When I was 21, I watched my fifty-five year old father die of a heart attack after helping our neighbor attempt to lift a pool cover which had been half filled with rain. We failed to keep the rainwater from falling into the pool. We went home, he sat down in one of the leather chairs in the den, and turned pale. The pain hit him in the shoulders. He got up and went to the bedroom. I heard him suck air and called the paramedics. The last I saw of him was when they wheeled him out on the cart. All that chrome and clatter in our narrow hallway.

Two hours later, the doctor met my mother and me in the hallway of St. Bernardine’s Hospital. “He fought hard,” the doctor began. It was obvious what he was saying. My mother broke into tears, bitter tears of defeat.

Over the next few months, I thought every pain in my chest or shoulders or arms was a heart attack starting to happen. I was 21 years old and aware of my own mortality as I never had been aware of it before.

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I am writing about this tonight because a friend of mine from IRC returned after a long absence. She pointed us to this article. “Are you Karyn Burke?” asked another chatter. “Yes,” she said. “I am Karyn Burke.”

It was 9 a.m. Oct. 10.

“I had guests starting to arrive for the Miami game,” said the 47-year-old Web designer from Tallahassee. “I just started feeling a little bit of nausea.”

She continued to feel queasy and felt pressure in her chest. It got worse.

“I wouldn’t have said anything, but my left arm started to tingle. I had pancreatitis the year before, and the symptoms were the same, except for the tingling.”

“The tingling started to hurt, and I started to worry, so I told my husband and brother. I wanted them to know I have these symptoms.”
She started vomiting. She began to feel clammy and cold. Her husband came to check on her, laid her across the end of the bed and turned on the fan.
“I told him, ‘I think you’re going to have to call an ambulance,”‘ she said. “The last thing I remember, I got on the stretcher, and they were working on me.”

Karyn and I want you to know that women are at risk for heart attacks. You may not be overweight, your chloresterol may not be high, but you should take chest pain seriously.

My friend blamed the pain on her stomach, her pancreas, her lungs, until it was almost too late. She smoked and never bothered to check on her family’s history of heart disease. Like many women, she believed herself somehow immune from failures of the chest’s most vital muscle. Fortunately, when the pain became too much for her, she asked her husband to call for assistance. That decision saved her life and changed the way she lives.

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A few months before he died, my father was angry at me because the car I was driving had popped a fuel line. He got like that, sometimes. Forces beyond anyone’s control would cause a machine to wear out. This time he grumbled that the fuel line was like my asthma: psychosomatic. To humor me, he went down to the local Volkswagen dealer. The mechanic raised the baby blue squareback on the rack and verified that the fuel line was ruptured. He needed half an hour to fix it. My father and I went for a walk.

When he turned bright red under the desert sun, I thought it was his temper. He stopped, leaned over, made a hissing sound by sucking air through his clenched jaw, and touched the curb with his finger tips. “What’s wrong?” He stood there like a division bracket or a gallows for about half a minute, seething in his agony. Then he stood up. “Nothing,” he barked.

Several months later I told my mother about the incident. She blamed me. It took me a long time to slough off the guilt: my mother, who worked in tandem with my brother, knew how to make it stick where it wasn’t deserved.

Now I realize that my father died as he did because he did not take responsibility for his health.

The same can happen to you. Know your body. Know the signs. Do something about them.

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You may have missed this, but it is not too late:

• The Heart Truth for Women
• Go Red for Women
• National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease
• National Women’s Health Information Center on Heart Disease

er one killer of women in the USA. Just as for men.