For over 41 years, Emmy-award winning actress Susan Lucci played Erica Kane on the ABC daytime soap opera All My Children. Kane was a fan favorite heroine-villain female fictional character who may have appeared heartless on the show at times. But now Lucci has some heart-filled real-life warnings for all women based on her personal experience with heart disease—which she discussed in a recent conversation with me.
The whole experience inspired Lucci to put her heart into serving as the national ambassador for the American Heart Association’s “Go Red For Women” campaign. And a big part of this “Red” campaign is to get everyone more well-read about the number one killer of women. Yes, as the AHA emphasizes, cardiovascular disease claims the lives of one in three women—more than all forms of cancer combined. Yet, only 44% of women realize that it is the leading cause of premature death among them.
Lucci’s Heart Disease Symptoms Began With Chest Pressure
When Lucci—who is currently 79 years of age—began recounting to me her first signs of heart disease, you could say that there was something she wanted to get off her chest. “In 2018, it was October, my husband and I were being led to our table at a restaurant, and I started to feel just a very, very slight pressure on my chest,” Lucci recalled. “I had never had any health issues at all, so I didn’t think anything of it and thought it’ll go away. By the time we were seated, it had gone away.”
That restaurant experience may have given her a little food for thought. But she didn’t really do anything until she experienced the symptoms again. “This happened to me one more time, similar thing at a restaurant a couple weeks later,” Lucci said. “But a week after that, I was at a boutique shopping for a birthday present for a good friend, and as the woman stepped away to take it back, to have it wrapped, I felt what I could not ignore anymore, like I had an elephant pressing on my chest.”
This elephant in the room, so to speak, became a little too much to ignore. “So I sat down on a bench to figure out what was going on,” she recounted. “The manager came up behind me, who I’d known for a long time, and asked me how I was, and I told her I was just trying to assess this.” When Lucci told the manager about the elephant feeling, the manager said that she could drive Lucci to St. Francis Hospital in Long Island, New York, which was only about a mile away.
Lucci Went To The Hospital And Got Some Surprise Findings
“My husband had afib, so I called his doctor as I didn’t have a cardiologist and had no need for one,” Lucci said. “I told him what was going on, and he said, ‘I want you to come into the ER because your, your syndrome are substantial so I’ll meet you there.’ And when I met him, I was thinking, ’I can’t do this today. This is my day off, and I’ve way too much to do. I don’t want to take him away from patients who really need him.’”
While she had some discomfort in “bothering” the doctor, her chest discomfort did go away by the time she had reached the emergency room. “But the doctor tested me, gave me a CT scan, and much to everyone’s surprise, came back and told me that I had a 90% blockage in my main artery and a 75% blockage in the other artery,” Lucci explained. “So the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry, I can fix it. We’ll take you up to the OR.”
It was already getting late at night so Lucci wondered whether she should go home and get a good night’s sleep before going through the procedure. “He said, ‘No, I don’t think you understand. You can have a heart attack at any time,’” she recalled. “So he took me up to the OR and had a heart surgeon standing by as well just in case they found something more.”
The Cardiologist Put Two Stents In Lucci’s Coronary Arteries
The cardiologist ended up putting two stents in the blocked coronary arteries. Coronary arteries are the blood vessels that supply blood and oxygen to much of the muscle in the heart. A coronary stent is a very small mesh-like metal tube that the doctor can insert into a coronary artery that’s either narrowed or completely blocked in order to keep the blood flowing through that vessel.
With this procedure, Lucci managed to avoid what the cardiologist called the “Widowmaker.” That soap opera-ish sounding nickname is used to describe the often deadly heart attacks that result from your left anterior descending coronary artery getting completely blocked. The LAD supplies blood to around half of your left ventricle, which is the biggest chamber in your heart that’s responsible for pumping blood to the rest of your body. Knock out your LV and your whole body is in a lot of el trouble. With her coronary blood flow restored, though, Lucci got discharged from the hospital by noon the next day.
The Experience Motivated Lucci To Bring More Awareness To Heart Disease In Women
In her car ride home, Lucci told her husband, Helmut Huber (who unfortunately passed away at age 84 in 2022), “’Honey, I cannot just keep this good luck for myself.’ I have very specific, good luck, my granddad on one shoulder as a guardian angel, my grandmother on the other, and the manager of the boutique, it turned out, had a degree in nursing. I mean, what are the odds?” Lucci felt, “I could not pass on my particular good luck and could pass on the takeaway.”
At the same time, Lucci recalled seeing an interview where a woman had emphasized how a woman’s symptoms of heart disease are often different than a man’s and mentioned the type of chest pressure that Lucci experienced as a possibility. Lucci said, “Thank God, this woman’s interview has saved my life, and I just thought, if I just tell this story now maybe even one woman might hear what I heard. Maybe it’ll save hers.”
Indeed, the symptoms of coronary artery disease that women experience may be much more subtle than the classic crushing chest pain that men frequently describe. Symptoms can range from pain in different parts of the body like the jaw, neck, upper back and shoulder to things that don’t even seem like heart disease like fatigue, nausea, vomiting, dizziness or cold sweats. Lucci went on to say, “So I called my publicist from the car. I wasn’t even home yet because it just had to pass it forward. I was on world news tonight and good morning America and right away the American Heart Association helps me get the message out.” In the ensuing year, she became a national ambassador for the AHA.
Lucci Didn’t Have Obvious Risk Factors For Heart Disease
Now, Lucci didn’t quite match what you may think is the stereotype of someone with heart disease. It’s not as if she was wolfing down ultra-processed or fat-filled fast food and couch surfing all day. Instead, she maintained a healthy diet of stuff like salmon, kale and blueberries. She remained physically active, doing Pilates nearly every day. And she would get regular check-ups with her doctor. This is a reminder that just because you don’t have the traditional risk factors for heart disease doesn’t mean that you can’t have it.
Retrospectively, though, a deeper dive into her family history did reveal something. “We thought I had never had any health issues and that I really had all my mother’s genes,” Lucci told me. “But it turned out that for me the blockage was due to calcium, which I inherited from my otherwise fabulous dad.” This raised another issue that Lucci wants people to be familiar with, namely their families: “I think it’s pretty normal for people in general to identify their health history with their same sex parent. But in my case, it came from my dad and I think it’s important to tell both sides of the family history.”
Lucci Went Through A Similar Experience Again
So, Lucci had gotten to the heart of the matter, was more aware of heart disease and was spreading that awareness to to others. No chance of the same kind of thing happening again, right? Not exactly. Three years later, and it was some déjà vu all over again.
“One night my husband was out playing cards, and I was home and felt similar symptoms, which I couldn’t believe,” Lucci recalled. “So, of course, I said exactly the things that I’ve told women not to do. I started to tell myself, ‘Oh, it’ll go away.’” When her husband returned home about a half hour later, Lucci didn’t even tell him and instead, “went upstairs, got ready for bed, and then I started to feel pain up my jaw, my left jaw, and I had heard that that was also a symptom for women having a heart event.” At first, she discounted it as a toothache. But it was far from the tooth. When she did tell her husband, they ended up calling the doctor.
Once again, Lucci didn’t want to “bother the doctor at this time. All the things I have been telling women not to do,” in her words. Her husband did drive her to the hospital, and there the doctor found another blockage of a coronary artery, requiring another stent to be placed. Lucci lamented, “I was so ashamed of my behavior, having been a spokesperson for an advocate for women’s heart health and telling them, ‘Don’t be afraid to call the doctor.’” But rather than slink away in shame, Lucci has since doubled down in her efforts to raise awareness with the “Go Red for Women” campaign.
Speaking of “red” or perhaps “read,” if you’ve already read Lucci’s just published new memoir La Lucci that she wrote with Laura Morton, you’ll find that she gets to the heart of the matter there too. This book is a follow-up to her 2011 New York Times bestseller autobiography entitled All My Life. This new book didn’t just raise Kane—as in her character Erica Cane. It included more details of her life such two chapters in the book about the aforementioned heart-felt experiences.
