According to the American Heart Association (AHA), heart disease kills nearly 50,000 Black women annually. The good news is, that when armed with the proper information, most heart disease deaths are preventable. Chantrise Holliman, a heart disease survivor and advocate for AHA’s Go Red for Women® Movement, hopes her second chance at life after a traumatic experience will encourage other women to take charge of their heart health.
On March 23, 2018, Holliman woke up with chest pains. She initially attributed them to indigestion from a cheese steak she had eaten the day before, assuring her husband that she was fine.
As the pain worsened, leading to nausea and vomiting, her husband decided to call an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, she lost consciousness.
“In my head, I was thinking no because I have to go to work – I’ve got interviews to do this – I’ve got 15 things I have to do, but I’m thankful that what came out of my mouth was yes,” Holliman says of her initial hesitation to call the ambulance.
In the ambulance, Holliman’s husband explained the chest pain she was experiencing to paramedics and requested that she be taken to their regular hospital.
“She said if you take her there she won’t make it,” Holliman recalls hearing the paramedic say before she blacked out. “The last three memories I have before I went unconscious was seeing my husband outside of the ambulance door getting in his car, hearing the sirens while I was in the ambulance, and then getting to the ER and seeing my husband standing outside…I don’t remember anything else after that until I regained consciousness about a week later.”
When Holliman regained consciousness, she immediately went back into work mode, wondering when she would get out of the hospital so that she could tend to her large to-do list.
The mother and wife, who had suffered a widowmaker heart attack (a type of heart attack that occurs when you have a full blockage in your heart’s biggest artery) realized that things would not be that simple.
“I also live with lupus and after many many weeks of being in the hospital, it turns out that I found out that the reason why my heart attack was so complicated was because at the same time as I was having a heart attack – I was also having a lupus flare so whatever they were trying to give me to save my heart – to save my life – my immune system… was fighting it so they had to go through some pretty extending circumstances just to save my life,” Holliman shares.
Doctors were unable to get her heart to continue beating, which led to her bleeding out as doctors tried to determine why.
“Once all of that was revealed to me and I was in recovery in the hospital, I realized that I was partially paralyzed from the waist down because of the procedure they had to do to get the stent into my heart,” the 51-year-old adds. “I actually ended up