Healing Hearts full transcript

Reporter: Rahni Sadler
Producer: Rebecca Le Tourneau

Jo Court: I had chest pain, very cold, clammy, sweaty and my whole body was in a state of shock.

Dr Kathy Magliato: Heart disease in women kills more women than all the cancers combined.

Emily Granger “A lot of the young women we operate on aren’t overweight, they often haven’t even been smokers. They have a heart attack.

Dr Kathy Magliato: The number one way that women present to the hospital with heart disease is dead.

Eamon O’Loughlin: The connection you have with your mother you don’t have with anyone else. It’s really hard not having that connection anymore.

RAHNI SADLER: Monica O’Loughlin was a non-smoker who kept fit and watched her diet.

At 51 she held two jobs, as an accountant and an energetic mother of five.

How much do you think she loved being a mum

Siobhan O’Loughlin: More than anything I think, yeah, I think it was her greatest role.

RAHNI SADLER: Ten out of ten on the mum scale.

Eamon O’Loughlin: Yeah, eleven, twelve.

Erin O’Loughlin: I saw her in the morning as she was leaving for work and she just popped her head around my door and kissed me goodbye and it was like a million other mornings, there was nothing unusual about it at all.

RAHNI SADLER: Would you have ever have thought that you would lose her at 51 from a heart attack?

Martin O’Loughlin: Not at all, I thought she’d outlive me by a good 20 years or something.

RAHNI SADLER: On May 5 last year Monica went to work and in the afternoon visited her sick mum.

There she suffered a massive heart attack and never regained consciousness, dieing in hospital five days later.

She’d never had heart problems but in the week before there’d been tail tell symptoms.

Martin O’Loughlin: Monica had had chest pains, such that she mentioned them to me and we talked about going to the doctor. She committed to do that and actually had an appointment with her GP the following day which she was never able to meet. There was no sense that it was an urgent problem or that it might be something that was critical.

RAHNI SADLER: Do you think the situation might have been different if she was a man, an older man?

Martin O’Loughlin: Yeah, if it had been me that had the chest pains we would have, both she and I would have been alarmed and thought of heart first up, but because she’d had the chest pains it was something that didn’t figure.

RAHNI SADLER: Who’s more likely to die of heart disease, a man or a woman?

Dr Kathy Magliato: A woman is more likely than a man to die of heart disease because a lot of times we pick it up at such a late stage that at that point, women either have heart disease that’s either unrepairable or it’s too far gone. Or what usually happens is they just drop dead from heart disease.

RAHNI SADLER: When LA based doctor, Kathy Magliato broke into the traditionally male world of heart surgery, she not only blazed a trail for other women - she also noticed how many women were finding their way onto her operating table. It led Kathy to write this best selling book.

Dr Kathy Magliato: I wrote the book to tell the story of heart disease in women because heart disease is the number one killer of women, it’s just the best kept secret around.

You know it’s appalling to me that I can fill a room with women and ask them what is your number one health concern and the majority of them still say breast cancer, when it’s actual our hearts that are killing us, so women really need to take this seriously.

RAHNI SADLER: For too long women have ignored their hearts because they’ve thought of heart disease as a bloke’s problem.

But these days work stress, poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking and drinking affect women as much as they do men. And heart attacks can strike even the most clean living.

Dr Kathy Magliato: One of the first symptoms or the most common symptom they usually get is fatigue and the question is what woman out there who’s juggling and trying to balance family and career isn’t fatigued?

The other thing is I always get this statement from women, I don’t want to bother anyone so yes Dr Magliato I had nausea and chest pain and sweating and I collapsed, but I didn’t want to bother anybody so I didn’t call 911 or go to the ER and that’s the common things I see in women.

RAHNI SADLER: Tell me about the day of the heart attack.

Jo Court: I had a whole lot of symptoms. I had pain in my shoulder blade, I had shortness of breath, I had pain in my upper arms and I had a pressing feeling on my chest which felt towards the end like an elephant sitting on my chest.

It didn’t enter my mind that it was heart , I just proceeded thinking, soldier on, get over yourself.

RAHNI SADLER: Cause that’s what you always do as a mum?

Jo Court: Yes, yes.

RAHNI SADLER: Jo Court is the wife of former WA Premier, Richard Court.

On their wedding anniversary - five years ago –Jo thought she was coming down with the flu. For hours the 45 year old mum ignored the symptoms, even taking her daughter to the movies. Finally, she visited her doctor who sent her for a blood test. Only then did they learn it was an emergency.

Jo Court: When they were telling me you had a heart attack, I just thought, this can’t be right, there’s some mistake it can’t be me. I didn’t have any risk factors, I had never smoked, I was low cholesterol, low blood pressure, in a normal weight range and I had didn’t have any family history.

RAHNI SADLER: It took two years for Jo Court to recuperate. Jo’s delay in getting treatment left her heart permanently damaged.

Jo Court: Traditionally we’ve felt it’s more of a male, over sixty, overweight, smoker and now we’re starting to see clearly that this is very much a women’s issue, women do have heart attacks and women do have heart attacks early and we’re seeing them even younger than 45. I’ve spoken to women that have even amazed me, that have gone through even younger than forty five.

RAHNI SADLER: People just like you and me?

Jo Court: Absolutely.

Dr Emily Granger: Any history of heart disease?

RAHNI SADLER: Yep my grandfather died at 45 of a heart attack.

Dr Emily Granger: What often tends to be a very strong link with women and heart disease is family history. Often a lot of these women will come in a say no, apart from the occasional cigarette, my dad had his heart operation at 42 but otherwise I’ve had no problems Doc.

RAHNI SADLER: As one of Australia’s youngest heart surgeons, Emily Granger, sees the end result of Australian women failing to get their cholesterol and blood pressure checked.

Dr Emily Granger: This is a 54 year old woman who last year [resented having a massive heart attack to a local hospital.

RAHNI SADLER: Sadly many doctors miss symptoms in women they would immediately recognise in a man.

Over 11 000 Aussie women die every year from heart disease.

Dr Emily Granger: As a surgeon operating on women as a group, the outcomes aren’t as good for women, so really you don’t want to see people getting to the stage where they need heart surgery, especially as women, because they don’t do as well as the men after their bypass surgery. The risks are greater for women, the outcomes aren’t as good.

RAHNI SADLER: At 36 Emily’s knows that she too is at risk. She has two small children; a high pressure, all hours job; and a family history of heart disease.

Her advice – is never ignore a sign, never dismiss a symptom.

Dr Emily Granger: You have to act sooner rather than later, it’s best not to wait for that rugby game, of that footy game to finish, the key is to get help and get help early. The consequences are that if you are having a
heart attack, you’re heart is starved of oxygen and the cells are starting to complain and those cells complain with you getting chest pain initially, but then the cells start to die.

Siobhan O’Loughlin: The day after she died she was actually due to see the doctor and that actually proves the point even more that you need to take action immediately and take care of it immediately and don’t be fearful, don’t be scared, just go.

Libby O’Loughlin: Mum didn’t think it was anything, mum thought it was indigestion and now mum’s gone.

Erin O’Loughlin: It was the day after Mothers day and I was too panicked getting everything ready for the funeral so it sort of hit home for me a bit this year, which is the second mothers day.

RAHNI SADLER: Last Christmas Jo and her damaged heart suffered a second massive attack. With the support of her husband,
Richard, she’s slowly improving.

Richard Court: We’ve completely changed our approach to life, we now get a lot of enjoyment out of the very simple things, like each other’s company.
RAHNI SADLER: So it’s improved your life in a way?

Richard Court: In a way it has, to me I thought she would be the last person in the world who would have a heart attack. Now five years later we’ve been through two. The recovery since then has also been a very slow process. We have a course of action as to what we need to do both at home and when it gets to the point when we need to go to hospital.

Jo Court: I’m a very, very fortunate person to be alive, statically one in two people survive. Between eleven and twelve thousand women die of heart related issues every year, it’s extraordinary and those statistics don’t even include people like me that have survived.

Dr Kathy Magliato: Heart disease is a killer and sometimes it’s a silent killer.

RAHNI SADLER: This really is a matter of life and death isn’t it?

Dr Kathy Magliato: It is to me and it should be to your viewers absolutely.