A Walk to Fight Heart Disease

Forget the heart attacks of Hollywood.  Caryl Miller is living proof that a heart attack doesn't always begin with crushing chest pain and end with a dramatic collapse onto the floor.

"Everyone thinks of the big chest pain, with pain radiating down the arm," Miller, 56, says.  "The morning of my heart attack, I felt like I was merely getting a terrible chest cold.  I wasn't in pain.  I just thought, "Oh man, I've got a big one coming on."

When she got up to refill her coffee cup, she became dizzy.  The dizziness progressed, so she called for her husband, Scott, to help.  "I got real dizzy and incoherent, and the room spun," she says.  "That's basically all I remember until the ambulance got there."

Miller, who was in the midst of a heart attack, was rushed to Genesis Medical Center, Davenport, where experts outperform national standards for rapid treatment of heart attack.  AT Genesis, cardiologist Jon Robken, M.D., implanted three stents to prop open the blocked arteries in the right side of Miller's heart. 

Genesis ranks in the top 1 percent of submitting hospitals for its success at reopening blocked vessels, according to the American College of Cardiology.  With the help of a heart attack alert system, arteries are unblocked within an average of 58 minutes - far quicker than the national average of 91 minutes. 

"I coded twice that day and received several shocks with the paddles to jumpstart my heart," Miller says.  "I was in the ICU for 4 1/2 days.  When the nurses came to see me in my hospital room, they called me a Christmas miracle and said, 'We can't believe we're talking to you.  This is why we became nurses.'  A month later, I got two more stents." 

More than five months after her December 10, 2005, heart attack, Miller will walk in the June 3, 2006, Quad Cities Heart Walk.  Her family is joining her - a daughter and her fiancé from Omaha and a son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons from Glen Carbon, Ill.  In fact, she says she postponed a procedure to implant another stent, so she wouldn't miss the walk. 

"Until I had my heart attack, I had no idea I had heart disease," Miller says.  "I'd just been to my family doctor for a check-up, and my blood pressure and cholesterol were fine.  A week-and-a-half later, I'm being rushed to the hospital with a 100 percent blockage on the right side." 

She wants to spread the word that heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women.  "There has to be a reason why I survived after going through all that, and I'll find out sooner or later," she says.  "If it's to raise awareness of heart disease, then that will be plenty."