Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty
Susan Lucciwasn’t the only one shocked when chest pains first put her in the ER four years ago.
Heart health, she learned, isn’t always easy to see or to predict. “Even my cardiologist said that to look at me, you’d never think I was a heart patient,” she says.
When the Emmy-winning soap star, who played Erica Kane onAll My Childrenfor 41 years, first experienced symptoms in October 2018 — including intense chest pressure “like an elephant pressing down” and pain around her rib cage — she ignored them. With a daily routine of pilates and a mostly Mediterranean diet, it didn’t seem possible that she could be having heart trouble. “And like most women I thought, ‘I have too much to do. It will go away.’ I didn’t want to bother the cardiologist,” she says. “We take care of our children, we are advocates for our loved ones, but we’re not at the top of our own to-do list.
A scan revealed a 90% blockage in the main artery to her heart: “I didn’t realize how close I came to a fatal heart attack.” Her condition turned out to be genetic (“hereditary from my dad’s side”) and doctors put in two stents. “It’s important for everyone to know their family history,” Lucci says. “I don’t think that I ever mentioned my dad’s family history to a doctor.”
Last January (after indulging in lots of “comfort food” during the pandemic —“not my normal way of eating,” she says), Lucci had another scare. She began feeling short of breath and experiencing chest and then jaw pain. Despite her previous procedure, she was again reluctant to call a doctor. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “And after telling women for three years to not be afraid to call the doctor and to put themselves on their to-do list, I reverted back to all those things.”
“I almost wasn’t going to speak about it, I was so ashamed of myself. But it’s a reminder to be vigilant,” says Lucci, who’s just designed a new"Empower Your Heart"jewelry collection to support the AHA (25% of the sales will go toward the organization). The heart-themed pendants are “reminders for women to listen to their bodies,” she says.
Two months after her own last operation, Lucci lost her husband of 53 years, Helmut Huber, when he died at age 84. “After that, nothing seemed important, my health or anything else,” Lucci says. “I didn’t care about anything else.”
Susan Lucci and husband Helmut Huber in 2017.Steve Zak Photography/Getty
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Healing has been “a process, a journey,” she says. But today, “I feel good. I lost the love of my life and that’s been awful, but I have friends who make me laugh and keep me out and about, and I’m determined to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
source: people.com
