In case you didn’t know, we just celebrated National Wear Red Day, a day set aside to help raise awareness of heart disease in women…and honor those who’ve lost the battle against it. The figures are pretty staggering and I thought I’d take a minute to share a few of them:
- Heart disease is the leading cause of death of American women, killing more than a THIRD of them.
- More women than men die of heart disease each year.
- Women comprise only 27% of participants in all heart-related research studies.
- More than 200,000 women die each year from heart attacks- five times as many women as breast cancer.
- Women are less likely than men to receive appropriate treatment after a heart attack.
- More than 159,000 women die each year of congestive heart failure, accounting for 56.3% of all heart failure deaths.
The last one is what took my mom almost 2 years ago at the age of 64. She’d lived with congestive heart failure for 4+ years after having her first heart attack at 59. My mother was by far the most amazing woman I’ve ever known – and there are many, many more who’d back me up on that one! She had the incredible (and rare) gift of being able to inspire just about everyone she came in contact with! If she weren’t my mom, I’m sure I’d have been screaming jealous of all the attention she got from others just wanting to be around her. It’s funny, but now that I’ve been forced to look up and around me since she passed, I’ve been floored with how much she did and how many lives she touched!! And, of course, I feel even more blessed, knowing how devoted she was to her “calling”, that she still managed to give me so much of herself….
After her first heart attack, she jumped on board as a spokesperson for The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease in Washington DC . She also received training from the Mayo Clinic on women’s heart disease and studied like a med student to get herself educated on the subject so she could share this needed message with women everywhere. Being that she was also an artist, she used that talent as well to spread the word. I’m including a few links below should you be interested in seeing the painting she did for the NCWHD. It was unveiled in DC just a few months before she died and many of her family and friends were able to be there at the event. 🙂
The Coalition has Notecards of the painting for sale should you want to support the cause in some way. Here’s a link to the painting itself on Mom’s website (which my dad still hasn’t had the heart to remove yet…and I’m kinda glad he hasn’t). The site is such an inspiration still to the love-filled life she had. I know those of you who knew her, like me, miss her dreadfully. I’m just sorry that most of you won’t ever get a chance to know this incredible woman.
Still, through her influence, you can perhaps know a little more about the havoc heart disease wreaks on women and the lives around them. All women are someone’s mother, sister, daughter or wife and it’s a wretched business losing that to a disease that’s largely preventable! For more information on heart disease in women visit Prevention and Early Detection at the WomenHeart.org website.
Help take care of the women in your life!! 🙂
Heather Clarke
