Don’t go breaking their hearts this Valentine’s week

Posted on 10 February, 2020

On Saturday night, I stumbled across the video montage from my husband’s 2016 funeral and made the mistake of watching it.

Within seconds, I’d toppled decisively from a relatively happy place into an unexpected grief spiral.

This wave of grief is swamping me, in part, because this week I’m acting as media spokesperson for the Victor Chang Institute, as they offer free 10-minute heart checks in the Canberra Centre today, and make mobile heart health checks available for organisations across Canberra.

Sharing personal experience is a powerful way to persuade people to take advantage of opportunities like this, which are bound to save lives.

There’s a personal cost, though. Nobody wants to front up at ABC radio first thing on a Monday morning and talk about their husband’s death. I wish I was writing a different piece for HerCanberra right now instead of this one.

I could crawl into a private cave and never speak of this publicly again, but if we don’t share the human stories behind clinical health statistics, people may die, like my husband did. Families may be gutted, like ours was. Kids might grow up without a parent, like my son is doing. I won’t be a bystander to this kind of unnecessary emotional torture, when the fix might be so simple.

After Jeff died, it took my dad, then in his mid-80s, a couple of years to give into my frequent requests (some might say ‘nagging’) to see his GP.

He’s slim and healthy. He’s a non-drinker. He’s never smoked. He’d had no physical symptoms at all to hint that anything was untoward with his heart. We thought the test would be a formality.

“I’ve got the results,” he explained, a few days after his initial check had led to an angiogram. “There are 90% blockages in two arteries, a 70% blockage in a third and 30% blocked in a fourth. I need heart surgery.”

This couldn’t be happening to us again. Not after everything we’d already been through.

Taking your elderly dad for the exact surgery that would very likely have saved your husband’s life in middle age is a bittersweet experience.

To have stents inserted to open blocked arteries is only day surgery. It was under a local anaesthetic. Dad walked out of the hospital that evening feeling better than he’d felt walking into it the same day. A day or two of taking it easy, and he was straight back into life with gusto. Job done.

Of course, I was drowning in ‘what ifs…’

We’d been completely unaware of the risk. We hadn’t known one in three Australians die of cardiovascular disease. We didn’t realise heart disease was so insidious and stealthy, the way it crept up on you, unannounced, and stole you from your family overnight.

We hadn’t known the fix could be so simple.

I would have done anything in my power to avoid being widowed at 42. I’d give almost anything not to have to raise a broken-hearted five-year-old without his dad. One quick heart check, and perhaps a simple day surgery, and our family’s future would have looked so different…

Dying of a heart attack isn’t something that only happens to ‘other people’. Having a free, 10-minute heart test isn’t something to put off until life calms down a bit. When you do that, you play Russian roulette with your family’s lives.

There’s a secret that grieving people share only with those who’ve had a near miss. Life is more fragile, and our grip on the world more tenuous than we ever imagine.

So if I’m currently a mess from a spike in grief brought on by choosing to write articles like this one, it will be worth it, even if one person heeds this message.

May that person be you.

With love.

Emma

Find your nearest free Heart Health Checkpoint here.

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute Heart Health Check Tour is the largest public heart health screening initiative in NSW and the ACT, made possible by $150,000 in funding from the IMB Bank Community Foundation.