There are many serious health conditions that nobody wants, but the ones that strike the most suddenly for a lot of people are heart attacks and strokes.
And while these life-threatening events can be scary for anyone because we simply never know when they’ll happen , they’re a particular threat for women because their heart attack symptoms tend to be different and often subtler than the classic signs we see in men.
As if that didn’t already set the odds against one California woman’s survival when she experienced her own perilous situation, both her age and her level of fitness made it hard for her to believe it could ever happen to her.
Ever since she was five years old, Megan Corbin has made dancing her biggest passion.
According to Good Morning America , she was able to turn this passion into her career as she came of age. She performed in professional musicals and at a show in Las Vegas before the pandemic shut such avenues down.
Given how physically active her profession is and her overall health and youth, it didn’t strike her as particularly alarming when she felt pressure and pain in her back in July of 2020.
Instead, the 30 year old (at the time) figured these were simply gastrointestinal issues that would soon pass.
But when she woke up in the middle of the night, that pain became excruciating and was accompanied by a feeling of numbness in her arms.
Not only was her husband then able to convince her to go to the hospital, but there was also no way she was getting there without him.
In her words, “He literally had to scoop me up off the bathroom floor. I was limp. I couldn’t do anything.”
And while she was initially worried she had COVID-19, it was just as shocking to discover she was having a heart attack.
As she put it, “Prior to the heart attack, I was very active. It was not on my radar at all. I had no idea that something like this would happen to me.”
But what she learned after her diagnosis was that her cholesterol and blood pressure were higher than she imagined and that one of the main arteries to her heart was blocked.
This meant she had to be airlifted from Crescent City, California to Medford, Oregon so staff at a specialized cardiac unit could surgically insert a stent in the obstructed artery.
As she captured to some extent in the video shown here, she would then need to wait 10 days before she could be discharged and spent a few months recovering.
But by the fall of 2020, she would open her own dance studio and made a point of sharing her experiences with her students to teach them to listen to their bodies.
According to the CDC , how women’s bodies tend to tell them they’re experiencing a heart attack goes beyond the common chest pains and can include pain in the upper abdomen or back, as well as pain in the neck, jaw, or throat.
Nausea, vomiting and fatigue are also tell-tale symptoms and are just as easy to mistake for something gastrointestinal.
To further spread her message to women, Corbin participated in the American Heart Association’s “Real Women” campaign.
In her words, “Just don’t downplay your symptoms because it might be more serious than you think. Especially as women, we tend to go, go, go. We’re superwoman. We do it all. We have to know when to step back and realize that we need a breather.”
h/t: Good Morning America
