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After taking her daughter to softball practice, Kelly Sosnowski popped over to the mall to run an errand.<\/p>\n
Walking<\/a> inside, she felt a heavy pain<\/a> in her chest and upper back. She paused and the pain<\/a> let up. But when she started walking<\/a> again, the pain<\/a> returned.<\/p>\n She found a place to sit and rest for a few minutes and the pain<\/a> went away. It reminded her of the feeling from lifting heavy boxes. Although she hadn’t been doing anything strenuous, she chalked it up to muscle soreness.<\/p>\n The next morning, Kelly was working from home. The tightness in her chest and back returned and was painful enough that she called her general practitioner.<\/p>\n “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was having a heart attack<\/a>,” she joked with her doctor.<\/p>\n The doctor said it sounded muscular and suggested that Kelly ice her back. She did and it helped.<\/p>\n That night, the tightness returned. It was even worse, causing shortness of breath<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Should we go to the emergency room?” her husband, Brian, asked.<\/p>\n “What can they do?” Kelly said. “It’s muscular.”<\/p>\n She had no reason to worry. At 41, she was healthy, ate well, wasn’t overweight<\/a> and had regular medical checkups.<\/p>\n In the shower the next day, the pain flared when Kelly raised her arms to wash her hair. An hour later, on a broiling Saturday in July, the family headed out to their son’s daylong baseball tournament an hour away.<\/p>\n Kelly felt the pain all day.<\/p>\n “She watched most of the game from the car, with the air conditioning cranking,” Brian said.<\/p>\n Although they had dinner reservations, Brian insisted they go straight home. That is, until he saw Kelly bending forward in the front seat in pain.<\/p>\n “We’re going to the hospital now,” he said, turning the car around and calling his in-laws to meet them to take the children.<\/p>\n In the emergency room, tests signified that Kelly had suffered a heart attack<\/a>. It was verified the next morning with an echocardiogram<\/a>. Her left anterior descending artery \u2013 the artery that feeds blood to the front and left side of the heart<\/a> \u2013 was 95% blocked. The next day, doctors implanted a stent<\/a> to restore blood flow to the heart.<\/p>\n Through those first two days, Kelly observed the activity around her without emotion, as if she were looking down on it, she said. Only after a visit from her son and daughter the day after surgery did the severity hit her.<\/p>\n “I cried all day,” she said.<\/p>\n Kelly went home the next day. Because of concerns about how much blood her heart could pump, she was given a wearable defibrillator<\/a>, a vest-like device that monitors the heart and can deliver a shock<\/a> to restore a normal heart rhythm if needed.<\/p>\n Instead of being reassured by the defibrillator<\/a>, Kelly and Brian felt the opposite.<\/p>\n “I was scared to live and afraid to die,” Kelly said.<\/p>\n “I felt like I slept with one eye open until that vest came off,” Brian said.<\/p>\n One month later, Kelly’s cardiologist declared that her heart had made a full recovery and she no longer needed the vest.<\/p>\n Still, her doubts lingered.<\/p>\n “I was still scared to death, the way this came out of left field,” said Kelly.<\/p>\n She does have heart disease<\/a> in her family \u2013 an uncle died of a heart attack and her father is monitored by a cardiologist \u2013 but had no previous health issues.<\/p>\n “At first, I was telling everyone that I was just short of a heart attack. But then Brian said, ‘No, you had one,'” she said.<\/p>\n She initially didn’t want to go to cardiac rehabilitation because “I’m young and healthy and you’re putting me in rehab for some deficiency I don’t have,” she said. “But I ended up loving it. It taught me I could trust my heart again and gave me the confidence to feel like I could be active and not die.”<\/p>\n In February 2018, Kelly attended her first American Heart Association event, a Go Red for Women luncheon, where she shared her story.<\/p>\n “I realized how important that was to my healing, both to hear other people’s stories and to tell mine,” she said.<\/p>\n She realized her story isn’t unique. Women wait longer than men to get treated for a heart attack, research shows. The median delay is about 54 hours in women and 16 hours in men.<\/p>\n Three years later, Kelly said, “I feel totally back to normal. I didn’t think this day would ever come.”<\/p>\n She’s back to exercising and monitors her heart rate and blood pressure<\/a>. She still volunteers to speak to groups about her experience, hoping others won’t dismiss their symptoms like she did.<\/p>\n
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