500 Womenheart Volunteers Will Spread the News About Women's Heart Disease

My friend Kay just turned 60. A couple of years ago she very nearly died of a heart attack. At the time she seemed to be in fairly good health. She was a little overweight, but exercised regularly, going to Jazzercise a couple of times a week.

Then one day she woke up with a pain in her shoulder. She thought nothing of it. She thought that maybe she had pulled something. But the pain didn't subside. Instead, it got worse. I suggested that she go to a doctor, but she shrugged it off. As a matter of fact, she didn't even have a doctor that she visited regularly.

The next day she noticed that the pain got really bad when she went up and down the stairs. She also attended the Japanese Festival and noticed that walking caused it to worsen. I finally nagged her enough that she agreed to see my doctor. I set her up with an appointment for Monday. The pain had begun on Friday.

The doctor said that it was probably nothing, but decided to run an electrocardiogram just to be sure. The test showed that she was right in the middle of having a heart attack. If she had waited any longer she would have died.

She was put on oxygen and rushed to the hospital where they did an immediate angioplasty to open up a coup[e of clogged arteries. (An interesting side note: The ambulance broke down on the way to the hospital.)

Kay is doing OK now. She has lost a few pounds and gave up eating potato chips and greasy fast food. She sees the doctor regularly and takes blood pressure medication and beta blockers and Plavix for her heart.

According to the St. Louis Front Page News:

"The Ready in Red campaign is led by WomenHeart Champions throughout the country - women heart disease survivors who are community leaders in education, advocacy and support for the 42.7 million American women living with or at risk for heart disease.

They are called Womenheart Champions because they are women who have went through it all and had a heart attack, sometimes more than one. More than 500 of them will advocate "early and accurate diagnosis, proper treatment and prevention of heart disease in women."

It used to be thought that because of estrogen women were more protected from heart disease than men, but the fact is that each year heart disease will kill more women than men in this country.

Heart disease costs more than $273 billion each year in the United States. If we could cut down just a few percentage points by increasing awareness, think of all the money that we could save, not to mention the lives as well.

Source: http://www.slfp.com/Community/HealthNews.htm