Carson Daly has been open about the toll of losing both his mother and stepdad a month apart. He wrote a personal essay for the Today Show for American Heart Month about losing his mom in 2017 to a heart attack. The thing was, she had already survived breast cancer and had type 1 diabetes so everyone focused on that part of her health instead of her heart. Only after she died did Carson learn of the correlation between diabetes and heart disease. So he’s bringing the topic up now because he doesn’t think enough people are paying attention to women’s heart disease.
I never would have guessed that my mom was going to die of a heart attack. She had some health issues — nothing in the heart. No symptoms. Never saw it coming. So I find myself this month being hyperaware about women and their health, as it pertains to the heart. Heart disease is the most common cause of death in American women. And I have been directly impacted by that.
My mom was a Type 1 diabetic. Through the years, she had really good health and good doctors. My biological father had passed away from cancer. She was very dialed into the cancer community. A lot of our friends are doctors. And so this is somebody who has great access to information.
Then she was diagnosed in the late ’90s with breast cancer. She had a single mastectomy. She opted for a chemo supplement. That threw her blood sugar into a bit of a tizzy, but she had that all worked out, squared away. She was cancer-free. Beat it. We’ve talked about that in October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. So it’s funny that I’m here in February talking about heart disease as it pertains to women, because ultimately, that would be the thing that would get my mom.
She died of a heart attack. We subsequently found out that the correlation between Type 1 diabetes and heart disease is very, very, very high. And I just never knew that.
I got the phone call late at night. It’s never good when the phone rings in the middle of the night. We know that. I had just left my mom, my (step)dad and my sister five or six hours prior to that. I was in Los Angeles for the Emmy awards, sleeping with my wife in a hotel and the phone rang. It was my sister.
I answered the phone saying, “Is Dad OK? Did he fall?” Because I was convinced it was about my father, whose health we were all so hyperfocused on at the time, because of an end-stage cancer diagnosis. And she goes, “No, it’s not Dad. It’s Mom.” And I was like, “Mom? I just left Mom. Mom’s great. No one’s worried about Mom. What happened?” “She had a heart attack and she’s gone.”
That’s what this is all about — educating each other, sharing our experiences. As painful as it might be for me to talk about this publicly, if it helps one other son who’s out there … my advice is to look out for heart disease. It’s literally killing women in this country more than any other thing. And we never see it coming.
Carson’s right. Heart disease is and has been the number one killer among women for some time and that keeps getting swept under the carpet. I’ll be willing to bet a good number of you reading this have had some sort of heart episode that you ‘waited out’ because you figured it was stress and didn’t want to bother anybody *raises hand.* So please look after your own heart health and ask the women around you to do the same. You can read Carson’s full essay here. I had a hard time excerpting it because it was really beautiful and I wanted to include all of it. I settled on just the health bits because of how important and unmentioned women’s heart health is.
I got goosebumps about his saying he’d just left his mom the day she died. This happened to my mother with her brother. She’d been visiting him in Florida, where he was a Navy pilot. He drove her to her flight home and when her plane touched down in California, her friend was waiting for her with the news her brother had been killed in plane crash. There’s something eerie but poetic about death allowing you a final goodbye. Carson included some texts his mom sent him hours before she died. He also mentioned a letter she’d written to him and his sister during her breast cancer battle on what he assumed had been a very bad day and she didn’t think she’d pull through. She told them she loved them and they should take care of each other. But then she lived and he never knew about the letter until after she died. It sounds like Carson and his sister, Quinn, took her advice. Quinn lived in California close to their parents. After both parents died, Quinn moved her entire family back east and now lives a block from Carson and his family. They realized they were all they had left and didn’t want to spend that time apart.
Wow, this really touches home today. I’m so glad he’s helping to educate, because I did not know that. I have been trying to lose weight lately, mainly to protect my heart. I was worried about some recent weight gain.
But they’ve found other problems just recently unrelated to my heart. I had already decided that today would be the day I write my family letters, just in case.
Women in general are encouraged to hide their health problems. We are taught shame from an early age so we are reluctant to talk about sexual health. We are taught to carry the burden of the family, so we are often silent about pain, discomfort, and definitely about painless symptoms. We are taught to be mindful of others, so we dismiss issues as stress, or poor sleep, or diet.
And when we do speak up, doctors often ignore us and dismiss us as hysterical or hypochondriacs.
The only solution is to educate ourselves and advocate for ourselves because the system is stacked up against us. And it’s even worse for women of color or lgbtq women.
Diabetes is a very dangerous disease. Anyone who has it or have loved ones who has it should really take care not about getting the sugar levels under control, but always keep their eye on the heart as well as the brain. It affects the blood and oxygen circulation in a massive way despite the fact that in ppl with diabetes present no symptoms. My dad had to have the heart surgery because of diabetes but passed a year later from a stroke which also was the result of diabetes.
My mom had 8 blockages in her heart and had heart surgery at age 44!
Brought a tear to my eye. His mother was lovely.
I have clients with diabetes who’s kidneys are greatly affected by this disease. So, not only can the heart be affected, but kidneys too. Other issues associated with diabetes include high blood pressure, pancreas malfunction , cataracts and gastroparesis (emptying of the stomach).
My mother in law had type 1 diabetes and had heart surgery requiring six bypasses. She ultimately died of a major hemorrhage in her brain from AVM.
I didn’t know that about T1D and heart disease. One of my sons is newly diagnosed with it and there’s so much to worry about. We’ve had so much education from the doc and nurses but so far heart disease hasn’t come up. Yet. Sigh.
My mom just had a stent put into one of her coronary arteries after experiencing unusually bad shortness of breath for a few weeks. It took ages to diagnose her blockage, she was really scared and frustrated because she kept thinking she was minutes away from a heart attack. She is and has always been extremely vigilant about her health, so she just wouldn’t let up with the docs, she knew something was really off.
This made me tear up today. I lost my mom to heart disease in 2011. She was 56. (I was 26). She also had diabetes, but type 2. She took care of everyone else but herself, until it was too late. She had 4 heart attacks (first at age 50!), a stroke and a host of other issues before she died.
I think about her and miss her all the time. I exercise BECAUSE of her. I don’t want to leave my children early. Heart disease is a serious reality in my family—just about every member on my mom’s side has either had a heart attack, died of heart disease or has related issues. I hope it’s not my own story. So that’s why I exercise.
I’m glad he’s sharing this story. I didn’t know about the correlation between diabetes and heart attacks.
My mother gave me the gift of unconditional love. When she died I absolutely felt like a physical part of me was gone. My grief crippled me. She had fought her way past two bouts of cancer, breast and thyroid, and was finally feeling good again. But it was a heart attack that killed her. Our doctor told us that her whole system was weakened by her cancer battle, and that it was her heart that gave out. I have wished many times that he had talked to us about heart health.
My mother in law was wonderful. She had gone to a new doctor about a UTI. He put her on a sulpha drug without checking her chart to see that she had a sulpha allergy. Three days later she collapsed and we got a call. We hurried to the hospital where we were told that she was having a heart attack. But she was not responding to any of the normal treatments for a heart attack. Finally, after 10 hours an infectious diseases doctor was called in. He immediately realized that she was having a severe allergy attack, not a heart attack. He changed her meds and within minutes her chest pain disappeared and she could breathe normally. That doctor told us that although he had caught the problem, that her heart had been damaged by the hours long allergy attack. Her health was never the same, and 6 months later she died of a heart attack.
We have to be our own best advocates. We have to ask questions, get informed, ask to be given tests like an EKG. We have to remind our doctors of drug allergies.
Honestly, the fact that the PHARMACIST didn’t catch the sulfa allergy almost shocks me more than the doctor. Most pharmaceutical software systems are legally required to track patient allergies against incoming prescriptions – or they warn that the patient has none available on the profile, prompting the need to counsel. Either way, what you get is a massive red pop up window that must be signed off by a pharmacist before it goes through. That’s two levels of doctorate level medial workers that failed your mother, and it’s kind of infuriating.
(Yet also not surprising – because my mother almost died of liver failure from a doctor prescribing a hepatically metabolized drug to relieve the symptoms of drug induced hepatitis, and it was only by her own careful observation that she caught it. And that was AFTER she had questioned the pharmacist about the reaction.)
Well that Instagram post he wrote got me all kinds of messed up right now. Brought a serious tear to my eye. My mother is going through some serious health issues right now so reading about Moms and their health issues can be rough.
It’s not so surprising if you know the science – free glucose in the blood, along with fatty acids, increases the oxidative stress placed on our blood vessels. It also accelerates artherosclerosis because it increases the inflammatory response from your immune system, leading to the risk of blockage. The problem is, of course, that most people don’t know this, and women’s health is often given less attention or dismissed as “histrionics.” I actually remember the huge push that occurred in the 2000s to improve education when the studies started coming out revealing that all of the previous data that marked women less susceptible to CAD was pretty much outright false.
This is exactly what happened to my father. No symptoms, nothing going on his heart on any recent exams, but he had severe type II. And smoked. We’d thought it was just due to smoking, but now reading this…dammit.
Same here, but with my mom. She died at 60 from a heart attack. No symptoms until the night she died. She’d had chest pains early in the evening, went to the emergency room and they told her she was fine–they couldn’t find a reason for the chest pains. She was sent home and died 4 hours later.
Heart attacks in women don’t express themselves with the same symptoms as men. Many women dismiss them. I read an article, and a woman described it like that feeling when you swallow too much of something like bread and take a drink…where it feels like your pipes are expanding in your chest. Another woman said she felt her symptoms in her back, not so much her chest.
Warning symptoms before the attack for women can include:
* Severe unexplained fatigue
* Sleep disturbances
* Shortness of breath, indigestion, anxiety
* Upper back pressure
* Dizziness or lightheadedness