When doctors warn that heart attacks don’t discriminate, Jessica Kennington knows they mean it.
The healthy, athletic Harlem resident didn’t suffer from high cholesterol or high blood pressure — and yet she had a heart attack six months ago, on her first wedding anniversary, at the age of 31. Doctors are still working to figure out the exact cause.
“I remember the doctors saying it would have had a grown man on the floor,” she says. “Honestly, it never occurred to me that I was having a heart attack.”
The disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with about 735,000 people experiencing a heart attack each year and men accounting for more than half the deaths. And fewer women than men survive their first heart attack, according to the American Heart Association.
Luckily, it’s preventable in many instances — and treatable — if you get help in time. “You have to act fast, at the first sign of potential heart attack symptoms, because time is of the essence,” says Dr. Steven Reisman, a cardiologist and the director of the New York Cardiac Diagnostic Center.
As Heart Month continues, New York survivors — all nonsmokers — share the early warning signs that they wish they hadn’t ignored. And experts say you shouldn’t either.
She thought she had the flu
Six months ago, Kennington felt like she had the flu. The fit Harlem resident noticed a tightness in her chest while walking to her job as a program manager at a Manhattan hospital.
Ten days later, that tightness turned into an inability to catch her breath, coupled with pain across her chest, the left side of her arm and up into her jaw. So she went to the hospital, where tests revealed what she still can’t believe: She had been having a heart attack for 10 days.
But following the scare, her grandmother revealed that Kennington’s grandfather had had a heart attack when he was 38 — and that he later died from one at 51.
Doctors put in a stent to clear a clot and gave Kennington medicine to keep her arteries healthy.
She’s now entering her final week of outpatient cardiac rehab at Mount Sinai, a program that monitors her heart.
She’s also constantly watching her cholesterol, has cut back on salt and red meat and exercises regularly. Her biggest lesson: Listen to your body.
“I had no idea that I could walk around for 10 days while I was having it,” she says.
The expert says: Chest pains are a sign to seek help immediately, no matter what your age. Kennington did so just in time — but the sooner the better. “Chest pressure combined with sweating and pain down the arms is a classic symptom you can’t ignore,” says Mary McLaughlin, Kennington’s doctor and an associate professor of cardiology at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Her cholesterol was sky-high
But one morning in 2012, the Astoria, Queens, resident woke up feeling nauseated. After 12 hours, she took a taxi to the ER to examine what she thought was the flu. “Immediately they took an EKG and they said, ‘Something’s wrong,’ ” she says. “They brought me up to the heart floor and saved my life.”
A year later, she had another heart attack. She admits she wasn’t exercising and had cheated on her diet, but now she hits the gym three times a week and eats better. She takes medicine, too, to stabilize her high cholesterol, and has dropped 30 pounds.
The expert says: Although Goodbaum’s cholesterol has been difficult to control even with the best drugs, her doctor, Harmony Reynolds, says it’s gone down quite a bit thanks to medication, diet changes and exercise. “Go to your doctor and ask for a cholesterol blood test,” adds Reynolds, who recommends starting at age 25.
He had a strong family history
The Flushing resident regularly saw a cardiologist before his heart attack — he had a strong family history of heart disease: His mother died from a heart attack at age 40, his dad has had two triple bypasses and his sister suffered two heart attacks at age 37. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and exercised regularly.
“Six months before my heart attack, I had an angiogram,” he says. “My cardiologist told me at the time that I’d never have to worry about having a heart attack, because I have huge arteries, and it’s almost impossible for them to be blocked.”
But after nasal surgery, he began experiencing chest pains. Chalking it up to the surgery, he waited two weeks before seeing his physician.
“The most scared I’ve ever been was seeing the look on his face when he came back in with the [EKG] results,” he says. “[My doctor] basically said, ‘If you hadn’t been exercising and watching what you eat, you’d be dead.’”
At Mount Sinai, Clancy had two stents put in his heart. His cardiologist attributed his heart attack to genetics and stress. He’s since cut back his weekly work hours from 100 to 70, and he takes a break midday to exercise. He also shed 40 pounds from his 315-pound frame.
The expert says: Cardiologist Steven Reisman says that if someone in your family has had a heart attack before age 50, that could spell trouble for you too. “If someone has a strong family history, we’d be very aggressive at looking for their risk factors [like stress and cholesterol] and seeing what they could modify,” he says. “At the age of 40 one should consider getting screened at least once.”
She was born with heart disease
Her primary care physician did an EKG and heard a heart murmur, but he said it wasn’t alarming. He gave the Upper East Sider blood-pressure pills and sent her home.
About a week later, she had a heart attack and underwent open-heart surgery to treat hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease that caused her heart muscle to become abnormally thick. One in 500 people in the US have the genetic disease, according to the AHA.
“I was born with it, and it went 47 years undetected,” she says. “My mother and my father are both deceased, so I didn’t [know] the family history.”
The surgery was a success, and doctors shaved off some of the muscle to create the necessary space in her heart.
Her risk for another heart attack still exists, as the muscle can grow back. That shouldn’t happen, however, for another 30-something years.
Looking back on the experience, she can’t help but wonder what would have happened had her primary care doctor done more initially.
“When I called him later and told him I had a heart attack, he said to me, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And I said, ‘I came to you and told you what was going on with me, and you didn’t help me,’ ” she says. “And he said, ‘You’re just one of the cases that slipped through the cracks.’ And I hung up on him. I almost died — that’s not a slip through the cracks.”
The expert says: Reisman advises anyone with strong risk factors — including family history, high blood pressure, obesity and elevated cholesterol — or heart-attack symptoms to consult a cardiologist and make sure they receive proper attention immediately.
“We can do a simple ultrasound of the heart — a 20-minute test,” he says. “Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy can definitely be detected by looking at the thickness of the heart on that type of test.”
She thought she had vertigo
But the next morning, the advertising manager was vomiting into the trash can next to her desk at work as excruciating back pain set in.
By that afternoon, she was at Bellevue Hospital, getting a stent to save her life.
She had total blockage in one of her arteries and an aneurysm in her left anterior descending artery — a clot that would have killed her had it not been treated.
Both her parents had heart disease, and Green thought she was taking the right precautions by watching her high cholesterol. Twelve years prior, she had also quit her habit of smoking a few cigarettes a day.
Now, she’s gone further — taking daily medicine, watching her diet and clocking 10,000 steps a day.
“I could go eat hamburgers every day and drink soda and juice,” she says. “But I want to live.”
The expert says: “Nausea can definitely be a symptom of a heart attack,” Reisman says. “Women are known to have atypical symptoms sometimes … and they can be underdiagnosed. Because of this, we have to have our antennae up and be aggressive about testing if some of these symptoms develop.”