Women Should Get Heart Smart

Marian Turk and Torrey Crozier didn't set out to represent every woman's story.

Yet Turk, a Ransom Everglades teacher in Coconut Grove, and Crozier, a special ed teacher at Manatee Bay Elementary in Weston, are every woman.

Both suffered heart disease and, initially, no one had a clue.

Turk, 65, never had an inkling she could be a candidate for heart disease. There wasn't a family history of it. She never had the classic symptoms of chest pain or numbness down the left side.

"I had been healthy my whole life, been athletic, active."

But in the early 1990s, at age 45, Turk kept getting pneumonia. "My primary care guy missed the whole thing. Suggested I seek psychiatric help. I had a student whose father was a cardiologist and he put me on the right track and found I needed an aortic valve replacement."

That was the good news. Turk had the surgery in 1992 at Mount Sinai.

"You're 45, you'll bounce right back from this, this is not a problem," she was told. "That did not happen."

Last year in March she had to have her aortic valve replaced again.

"The doctor I'd had clearly didn't know. I didn't have symptoms. I never had chest pain or anything that would clue me in. Being told that it was psychosomatic, I started to wonder myself."

Over the years, Turk began missing work when she didn't feel well. Her supervisor called her "a malingerer" because she'd missed so many days, she said. "You start to doubt yourself. I never doubted the system. They are the pros. They are supposed to know. Since then I've become so much more able to speak for myself, it's a hard way to learn a lesson."

Crozier, 67, similarly was discounted by physicians when she began suffering debilitating back pain around the time Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. She did have a family history of heart disease and borderline high blood pressure and cholesterol but not high enough to warrant medication. When she wound up in the emergency room at Memorial Regional Hospital, doctors ran various tests (but no heart tests) for three daysand were puzzled. She was to be discharged.

"Dr. Splaver was luckily assigned to me and he listened to my story and he said, 'No, we're not letting her go, we're doing an angioplasty.' They found two totally blocked arteries."

Crozier had double bypass surgery and, post-surgery, one lung collapsed and then the other. She fought back. She's one of the lucky ones.

Heart disease claims the lives of half a million women a year in the United States and at least 40 percent of women do not survive their first heart attack, according to the American Heart Association. Men have a better chance of surviving that first heart attack.

The research is dramatic: Cardiovascular disease causes one death per minute among women in the United States, more than cancer, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's and accidents combined.

"One in two women will die of heart disease. To put that in perspective, one in 25 women will die of breast cancer. You'd have to add up the next seven causes of death and heart disease is still the leading cause," said cardiologist Dr. Todd Heimowitz, director of osteopathy at Mount Sinai's Aventura campus.