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Shocking Loss
As a teenager, Kathy saw her maternal grandmother, Kathryn, more as a mentor than a relative. Progressive for her time, "Nana" was a college graduate and always told Kathy and her sisters, Patricia and Ann Marie, they could accomplish anything. When Kathy was 22, she and her family were eating pork chops at Nana's house, and after the meal, her 61-year-old grandmother complained of indigestion. When the pain persisted, Kathy's uncle Jim (who would survive a heart attack nine years later) drove Nana to the hospital. She'd suffered a mild heart attack and was put on oxygen. Several days later, a major attack took her life. "I was devastated," Kathy says. "She was my best friend. If you went to the prom, she was the first one on the phone in the morning wanting to know what you did."In the midst of all the heartache, Kathy's mother, Patricia, had been unknowingly arming her girls against the ravages of heart disease. She'd take Kathy and her girlfriends skating at the neighborhood pond. Kathy and her sisters walked to and from Catholic school every day. After school, their mother would prepare snacks of fruit or peanut butter and celery sticks. Then the girls would flick on the tube, grab a partner or the nearest doorknob as a stand-in, and dance to the Beach Boys and Frankie Valli on American Bandstand.
Through young adulthood, becoming an x-ray technician and a wife and mom, Kathy continued the good health habits. She kept to a reasonable weight by eating low-fat meals and walking and playing tennis often. Still, her cholesterol climbed. Meanwhile, her father, Matthew Casey, a former tool and die shop worker, had been struggling with his health for years. In the late 1970s, with numerous clogged arteries, he had open-heart surgery at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. The quadruple bypass was a success, helping him live another 20 years, before he developed pulmonary edema and died seven years ago, at age 79.
Heart disease had also done its silent, deadly work on Kathy's blond, blue-eyed mother. In 1980, Kathy had just gotten home from a Girl Scouts meeting with daughter Beth when her sister Ann Marie, who lived in the next town over, called. "Get to the hospital. Jack took Mom there. We think she's had a mild heart attack."
Kathy thought for sure her 55-year-old mother would pull through. But two days later, a nurse called and said she needed Kathy and her sister to come right away. As they walked toward the entrance, they could see the doctor waiting for them through the glass doors and were overcome with dread. Their mother, who had likely suffered a subsequent attack that morning, had passed away.
"I was shocked. She was so young," Kathy says. "I thought, Oh, my gosh, my kids are never going to know her."
Now, three years later, Kathy's little sister was the eighth victim. The doctors had determined that Ann Marie's attack was the result of a clot in her hardened arteries that had stopped blood flow and damaged the back chamber of her heart -- the same scenario that led to the deaths of her grandmother and mother. Ann Marie was pumped with blood thinners for a week before doctors let her go home with instructions to improve her diet and exercise habits. "That just did it for me," Kathy says of her sister's close call. "I said, I need to find out what I can do before this happens to me."
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