Dear Editor:
I write this to share important, even potentially life-saving information with women, young and old, throughout New Jersey. Did you know according to the American Heart Association, that heart disease is the number one killer of American females? That heart disease kills more than 10 times as many women annually as does breast cancer? And that more than 505,000 American females die annually from cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease and stroke?
But what does a 21-year-old Princeton University senior know about heart disease? My message to New Jersey females is simple. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
Four short years ago, as a 16-year-old New Jersey high school senior, heart disease was the furthest thing from my mind. I was a member of the National Honor Society, co-captain of the tennis team, secretary of the Key Club and involved in choir. My world revolved around my family, friends, school activities, looking forward to my senior year and life after high school. My world changed on September 21, 1998. Out to dinner with my family to celebrate my aunt’s birthday, I excused myself from the table. Suddenly, I was dizzy and lightheaded. I felt pressure pains from my chest to my neck and heaviness in my arms. My family immediately called 9-1-1, ambulances responded, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was 16 years old, and I was having a major heart attack.
I was diagnosed with a large immovable clot in the left side of my heart. An angioplasty procedure and double-bypass surgery failed. My heart was failing, my lungs were filling up with fluid, and my family was told that I probably would not survive. I was read Last Rites.
Somehow I survived the night and began to fight back. My only hope for long-term survival, however, would be a heart transplant. On top of everything else, the lower portion of my left leg had to be amputated due to complications from my treatments.
Even in the face of such adversity, I was determined to return to school and graduate with my class. My heart was severely damaged and could not work on its own, and the wait for a heart transplant would be a long one. With more than 80,000 people waiting for organ and tissue transplants each year, there is a critical shortage of organ donors in our country. I returned to high school on November 20, 1998. As I waited for my heart transplant, with me at all times was my “Heartmate,” a then-experimental mechanical heart assist device. This machine, a Left Ventricular Assist Device or LVAD, was part inside, part outside my body and connected to my heart to help the heart continue pumping blood.
After nine long months, and only four days before my high school graduation, news came of a heart transplant match. I received a new heart, that of an 18-year-old girl from Pennsylvania. I am eternally grateful.
In a matter of weeks I will be graduating from Princeton University. I’m winding down with classes and working on my senior thesis, and I’m a woman who fought and survived a major heart event. Thanks to science, research advances, wonderful doctors and family, I have been able to experience a fairly typical, active and rewarding four years at Princeton. But if it can happen to me, it can happen to any New Jersey female.
The American Heart Association says that more women than men have died from cardiovascular diseases every year since 1984, and each year that gap in deaths continues to widen. Women are facing a “silent epidemic.”
On May 6, the American Heart Association will hold its first-ever New Jersey Women With Heart Luncheon. We hope to bring together more than 200 of New Jersey’s female leaders in business, health, education and state and local government to learn more about the “silent epidemic” facing women — cardiovascualr disease. If you are a woman, or there is a woman in your life you care about, Take Charge! of your life and your cardiovascular health. Join us on May 6 in Princeton for the American Heart Association Women With Heart Luncheon and learn about your personal risk factors for heart disease and stroke. For more information about the Women With Heart Luncheon, please call the American Heart Association in New Jersey at 732-821-2610.
Jessica Melore