A Wake-Up Call

Experiencing the loss of her mother, Janice, to heart disease started to reshape how Stacey thinks about women's heart health and helped influence her decisions about her health and her own family.  

"What can I do to make sure I'm around for my daughter?" Stacey recalls thinking in 2007, as her daughter was only 7 years old when her grandmother passed away. 

"I realized I really want to be here to watch my daughter grow up, get married and have a family someday,” she says. “That’s when I started to think, 'What can I do to make sure I am here as long as I can be?'"  

While she didn’t have most of the common lifestyle risk factors for heart disease, her family history made the risks feel real and specific. 

"My mom’s mother had a stroke, and her father had a heart attack," Stacey shares. "I have to do what I can to control the lifestyle factors, such as what I eat and how much I exercise, because I can’t control the hereditary ones."

Prevention Is an Act of Hope 

Stacey frequently hears one reason why women avoid screenings: they don't want to receive bad news.  

"I hear people say all the time, 'They don't want to know,'" she explains. "You want to be surprised? You might have a heart attack out of nowhere when you could have known it was coming and taken steps to prevent it." 

Ultimately, she identifies what she believes is at the core of the issue: "The fear is that I'm going to find out something I don't want to know and that I'll have to make a change. And the fear is really about the change itself." 

Stacey encourages others, especially women to be proactive about their heart health, from practicing healthier habits to advocating for themselves. 

"As women, we often ignore our health; those aches, pains or a nagging feeling that we brush aside. We often think, 'Oh, it's just some indigestion or a bit of acid reflux. It'll pass,” she says. “But deep down, we know when something isn't right. Don't hesitate to ask your doctor or go to an emergency room. It could save your life.” 

Women’s symptoms can be overlooked easily because they don’t necessarily match the typical signs of a man’s heart attack.  

“Indigestion, pain in the jaw and neck, back or shoulder pain, nausea, weakness or chest pain -- I never would have known all those could have been warning signs,” she says. “That’s what makes heart disease women’s number one killer – we miss the signs.”  

For now, Stacey says she is thrilled to know her calcium score is 0 at age 55: that means there is not enough calcified plaque in her arteries for the CT scan to detect. 

“That is good news and motivates me to keep it that way by staying active and making healthier eating choices. This score is only one piece of the complex heart health puzzle, but it’s one I can monitor every few years.”