BENTONVILLE, Ark. — For one Bentonville woman, February, American Heart Month, hits close to home. Heart disease kills more people worldwide than all forms of cancer combined.
“If I had listed all the things that I was afraid of in my life, heart disease wouldn't have been on the list at all,” heart failure survivor and author Lori Ann Wood said.
A little more than eight years ago, Wood got the news she never expected.
“I was just not feeling well. I was feeling tired and sluggish,” Wood said. “I went to see my primary care doctor, he listened to my heart with a stethoscope and said, ‘If we're lucky, it's pneumonia.’ I remember thinking, ‘I thought that was the worst-case scenario.’”
The diagnosis: end-stage heart failure, with her heart functioning at only six percent.
After a stay in the ICU and Cleveland Clinic, Wood survived, but her life was forever changed.
“I'm on a lot of medication and a lot of lifestyle adjustments. I'm trying to do everything the doctors say, but the reality is, heart failure is a chronic progressive disease, and it only goes in one direction,” Wood said. “Even though you can have blips up, generally, it only goes down.”
With no known risk factors and no family history of heart disease, it’s a situation she never thought she would be in.
“I've always had low blood pressure and low cholesterol, and I’ve always been healthy. I've never been in the hospital, never been on any medication,” Wood said.
However, looking back, she said she feels there were warning signs she ignored.
“I just didn't see them as heart-related. I knew they were happening to me, but I made excuses,” Wood said.
Some of the symptoms she remembers were frequent shortness of breath, a constant dry cough, and an inability to exercise or do anything that required physical exertion.
“The symptoms that are so scary are those little tiny ones that seem so insignificant by themselves, but when you take them all together, they become something huge,” Wood said.
After her diagnosis, Wood trained with the Mayo Clinic to become a community educator for the organization WomenHeart, and wrote a book about her experience called Divine Detour.
She said this was all to educate others about warning signs of heart failure, in hopes her story might help others have an earlier diagnosis and a better outcome.
“If you have something, go ahead and ask it, because the worst thing is to have this question unasked that ends up being something very serious later on,” Wood said. "The only way we can prevent that is to be aware.”
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