Women and Heart Disease: my journal -- and yours??

This is the essence of Chapter One... horrifying, instructive, shocking... do read on...

How Could This Be Happening?: The Initiation

I sat quivering nervously, impatiently on a cold chair in a corner of the emergency room, alone, ignored, alternating between fear and fury. I couldn't have had a heart attack - or had I?
Like so many people with undiscovered, potentially disastrous diseases, I seemed to be the picture of health. I had lost about ten pounds and kept it off, not achieving perfection, but removing a likely threat, considering my history. I had been diagnosed several years earlier with labile hypertension and the accompanying annoyance of fluid retention, both hereditary. My father had a fatal heart attack in his early forties, when I was nineteen, my brother merely fifteen. He had duplicated his own mother's history.
For me, medication was successful in stabilizing my blood pressure, my cholesterol levels were only slightly elevated and I was under the care of a competent physician. My attitude was positive - I have labeled myself an "optimistic realist" - and although neither a purist nor a structured exercise person, I was fast-moving, active and avid in my belief that my rich emotional life would be a benefit to my health. So it was rather a stunning irony when, in September of 1998, at the relatively young age of 52, I had three heart attacks, all within a one-week period. The first episode brought me to the emergency room, but I was determined that the team would establish that the pain had been caused by some peculiar gastric upset, rather than anything heart-related. I was adamant that I was due to leave for vacation in just two hours and wanted medical clarification quickly so that my family would not have to be diverted to the frightening E.R. (Emergency Room) Didn't they understand that I was on my way to the airport for a long-anticipated vacation and that this could not be happening? I would learn later that this degree of denial typifies the earliest phase of the discovery of unwanted news.
I was admitted, against my desire but at the insistence of the E.R. attending physician, and then had a full-blown heart attack in the middle of the night right there in my hospital bed! Exactly one week later, having been home for only one and a half days, a repeat performance, necessitating an ambulance crew to return me to the hospital for yet another week's stay. Concisely explained, complete blockage of the most crucial vessel, the left anterior descending artery (LAD) had recurred.
But I was so different! Shouldn't my emotional health, self-awareness and lifestyle compensate for heredity? After all, if communication had been considered within the realm of athletic prowess, I might have been considered a star! In theory, I could hear my own voice saying for decades… don't hold things in, be in touch with your feelings, welcome new ideas, use humor as a survival feature, relentlessly pursue the teaching - and learning - involved in the acquisition of strategies of living leading to greater joy and understanding among people. With this philosophy of life in place, this could not really be happening. Ah, but in practice - and I was a novice in this area - there was no offer of immunity, no trade-off forthcoming as a reward for conscientious effort and even good health! The nodding heads of everyone who has suffered the cruel indignity of having to admit to illness will serve as recognition of my plight.
There was another piece of the puzzle that I had not factored into the equation: I had finally, sadly, frustratingly realized that my twelve-year marriage was in dire trouble and I was terribly unhappy, disappointed and hurt. We both tried to comprehend each of our needs in the hope of assisting the relationship. We were in the midst of building a business together and the rigors of that and his ever-growing inner tension and personal turmoil brought unbearable stress to both of us. I held fast to the notion that I could manage, that I would wait out his crisis, but our differences became difficulties and the stress turned to distress and certainly must have exacerbated what I did not even know was brewing. Our tenacity and drive proved inadequate and the disappointment and strain were immeasurable. We cannot discount this level of stress and the disarming role it plays on our bodies. No doubt he was as unhappy as I was, daunted by my health issues and not altogether pleased with my new-found friendships in cardiac rehab - and what he interpreted as separateness from him.
So many of us either have momentary lapses or have yet to learn that self-love, wholeness, must be present so that when a relationship ceases to exist, we can rely on our positive self-regard and continue to flourish without that alliance. In the presence of catastrophe, it is essential that this concept be strong and ever-present. It granted me sufficient motivation to sustain me even as my body seemed to conspire against me, but it was hard work.