Women at Risk of Heart Attack: A Personal Experience, a Personal Research

Like most women, Mickey Wapner spent her adult years worrying about breast cancer – then she was blind-sided by a heart attack that almost killed her. In a gripping revelation, she writes about her harrowing near death experience, her coma, and the heroic efforts of the medical team to save her life. She vowed to find out what had caused this out-of-the blue attack in such a healthy woman. Finding no clues in the most well-known causes of heart disease, she takes us along on a journey of discovery. Long a feminine activist and former member of the California Commission on the Status of Women, Ms. Wapner discovered another gender gap, a gender gap in research on women and heart disease. Most research has been done on men; much much more needs to be done on women – and it is thankfully now underway. A woman is twice as likely as a man to die soon after her first heart attack; if she survives, she is likely to suffer more debilitating pain and to suffer a second heart attack. Perhaps the worst manifestation of the heart disease gender gap is found in diagnosis and treatment. Women are often told by their doctors that their symptoms are psychoogical – the same symptoms that in a man would call for emergency testing or hospitalization. Mickey Wapner has written this book to share her experience and knowledge with women… and the men they love and live with. And to shout, “Ladies, take care of yourselves!”