Today I wore Red

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Today I wore red in honor of National Go Red Day.  This month the American Red Cross is drawing attention to the #1 killer of American women: heart disease.  

This hits home for me.  My mother’s mother died of a heart attack at the age of 44. My mother died of a heart attack at the age of 57.  Both women were not overweight.  They were non-smokers.  But they both suffered from high blood pressure.  They both died suddenly.

My mother did not the have the benefit of asking her mother for advice when she had her first child.  I couldn’t pick up the phone to ask my mother a question after I had my own children.

This is something I think about as a parent. How do I ensure that I will be around for my own kids?

The same way some women worry about breast cancer lurking in their genes, I worry about heart disease.

I’m relatively healthy. I workout. I try to be mindful of what I eat.  But I’m fighting the God-given set of genes I was born with.

One year, shortly after my mom died, I gave my sister and my aunts blood pressure monitors for Christmas.  I know, not a terribly exciting gift. But it was a gift I thought might help save their lives.

More women die of cardiovascular disease than from the next four causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer.  According to the American Heart Association, “80 percent of cardiac events in women could be prevented if women made the right choices for their hearts involving diet, exercise and abstinence from smoking.”  Know the symptoms of a heart attack and stroke.

From the American Heart Association:

Signs of a Heart Attack:

1. Uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain in the center of your chest. It lasts more than a few minutes, or goes away and comes back.
2. Pain or discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach.
3. Shortness of breath with or without chest discomfort.
4. Other signs such as breaking out in a cold sweat, nausea or lightheadedness.
5. As with men, women’s most common heart attack symptom is chest pain or discomfort. But women are somewhat more likely than men to experience some of the other common symptoms, particularly shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting and back or jaw pain.

If you have any of these signs, don’t wait more than five minutes before calling for help. Call 9-1-1…Get to a hospital right away.

Signs of Stroke and TIAs

1. Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body
2.  Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding
3.  Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes        
4. Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination
5. Sudden severe headache with no known cause

Also, check the time so you’ll know when the first symptoms appeared. It’s very important to take immediate action. Research from the American Heart Association has shown that if given within three hours of the start of symptoms, a clot-busting drug can reduce long-term disability for the most common type of stroke.