Why “it won’t happen to me” isn’t enough when it comes to heart attacks
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Like most of Australia, I woke the other day to an explosion of headlines about Shane Warne’s sudden death, at 52, from a heart attack.
Less than a week later, news broke of the death of another 52-year-old in the public sphere, Labor Senator, Kimberley Kitching – again to a heart attack.
It’s fair to say there has been collective shock. We wonder how it’s possible for heart disease to steal someone larger-than-life. How can it snatch vibrant, symptomless people right out from under the loving gaze of their family, friends, colleagues and fans?
But that’s what heart disease does. It’s stealthy. Audacious. Ruthless.
Ironically, it’s also heartless. It doesn’t care who you are, what you do, how well you’re admired, and how many people love you or need you. It doesn’t care how much life you have left in you or how much good you still want to infuse into the world.
- In your prime? It doesn’t care.
- Just hitting your professional stride? Irrelevant.
- Sandwich-generation sole carer of family members with high needs? Heart disease could not care less.
In Australia, this insidious cause of death will creep up on one third of us. It will attack us with lethal precision and take us from our lives instantly, right in the middle of an ordinary day.
Sadly, I was not shocked when I read that Shane Warne had died. Nor Kimberley Kitching. I was shocked in 2016, when my husband, also in his fifties, died this way. Our family was taught in the cruellest method imaginable to expect that one in three people, often with no symptoms, sometimes in peak fitness… will simply drop dead.
That’s a brutal term: ‘drop dead’. But it describes the way heart attacks sideswipe us. There’s no time to call for help. No time for life to flash before your eyes. No time to regret not taking 15 minutes at the GP to have this checked out when you could…
Two years after my husband died, my dad, who was then 87, got sick of my nagging. His (then) GP had brushed off his request for heart tests because he was able to walk up a flight of stairs without getting puffed. When he finally pushed for the angiogram that would shut me up, the results were horrifying. One artery was 97% blocked. Another 70%. Two others were well on the way.
As I took my dad for the day surgery that could have saved my husband’s life, I pledged to speak up about our loss in the hope that the message would save another family from our brand of unspeakable grief.
My son had been five when he lost his dad. A kindergartener. Now in Year 6, he still talks about him every day. While we throw ourselves into life with spirit and resilience, nothing will ever be the same again. We’ll only ever be able to piece together a fractured mosaic of the life that was shattered.
Despite reading the stats, and even knowing people this has happened to, most of us put off having medical tests. We tell ourselves we ‘must get around to that’, but we get distracted. I think it’s because, no matter how much evidence we see around us that this could happen to us, we never quite believe it really will.
In the last two years, we’ve all been pulled in so many directions, many of them away from the doctor’s surgery. We’ve been rightly told to mask up, keep our distance and have Telehealth calls in lieu of coming in.
And now, confronted with yet more natural disasters, a new war in Europe, mental health crises and much more, it can be even harder to follow through on a health check that feels like it belongs firmly in the ‘won’t happen to me’ category.
Take it from the sole parent of a child who will grieve his dad’s death for the reminder of his days – it can happen to you. When we don’t have time for this, we gamble on the hope that we won’t be the one person in three who will no longer have time for anything.
Medicare-funded heart checks are available free from GPs if you’re over 45.
