Take It to Heart The Real Deal on Women and Heart Disease

1. WAKE-UP CALL I always thought of my life as a real heart-on. That is, up until the day my heart turned off. --PAMELA SERURE I am writing about a broken heart. Not the variety that comes from a disrupted family or a disillusioned love affair, nor the kind brought about by a longing that has never been fulfilled. Not that I haven't experienced those; I assure you I have endured all the varieties. But this particular story is about a different sort of heartbreak--the heartbreak caused by heart disease. The Heart Truth Heart disease is the number-one killer of American women. --AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION (AHA), 2005 I have always thought of my heart as beingon--vibrant, open, optimistic, and exuberant. Ever since I was a kid, I had believed that everything was possible. I knew that I was wanted and loved by my parents and my larger family, and that knowledge gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams. Being a born Scheherazade, I enjoyed playing to the crowd and lived for adventure. I never married or had children, because I didn't want to give up my freedom. Looking back on those choices, I recognize the profound emotional gratification I deprived myself of. Nevertheless, as life progressed, my various careers--designing jewelry, merchandising and creating fashion, and developing innovative health concepts--brought me much recognition and many accolades and awards. I felt satisfied (to a point) and successful (to a degree). Many of my friends became famous and I played on the fringes of celebrity. In my early forties, I wrote my first book,3 Days to Vitality, based on my healthy detox program, Get Juiced. I had become a juice-fasting guru among the Hampton set and was already two decades into meditation and yoga, but my internal mantra was "Do more--be more, have more." I still binged on stress whenever and wherever it appeared. It was the diet of choice for women on the fast track, and I was a born sprinter. Stress was a habit I sipped like a triple latte. But just like caffeine, stress provided only a false sense of being energized, and it barely kept me afloat. Also, it brought along with it its constant companions: cortisol, the stress hormone, which ravages the body, and adrenal fatigue, a burnout condition all of us stress junkies eventually experience. In never stopping, never taking no for an answer, never being or doing enough, I was wearing my heart out while my mind kept on going. But I wasn't paying attention. Sound familiar? I genuinely liked the person I was. I was at an exhilarating point in my life and I still believed that I could do anything . . . up until the day when my heart turnedoff. That is when I had to surrender the "More" and "Go"--the two commands by which I'd operated my life. Heart disease became my wake-up call: I had to stop listening to that prodding mantra and pay attention to the messages from my heart that I had ignored. Heart disease shocked me into accepting that my relentless drives had been serviced by all the emotions I had kept in check for years: doubt, fear, judgment, and a feeling of not being good enough. Those drives had kept me away from a deeper place of rest and gratitude in my life. And I needed to get to that place. I needed to put on the brakes and get down to the business of healing. Heart disease is the body's way of saying stop: Stop driving yourself; stop overreaching; stop trying to fix the world. Just stop whatever it is that you were so hell-bent on doing and breathe. All my dreams, confidence, creativity, and healthy living could not protect me from where my heart was about to take me . . . which was not, as I'd often hoped, to the love of my life or to all my dreams fulfilled, but to a 99 percent blockage of my arteries and triple bypass surgery. I hadheart disease, the old man's disease. TSerure, Pamela is the author of 'Take It to Heart The Real Deal on Women and Heart Disease', published 2006 under ISBN 9780767923101 and ISBN 0767923103.