Stop Making Carrie Fisher's Heart Attack about your Sexist Agenda -- and stop Coopting Veganism to do It

I just read Neal Barnard's blog where he takes Carrie Fisher to task for having a heart attack and then schools all women (white women?) about how we should all be taking better care of ourselves by eating a more plant-based diet.

“I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.” Yeah, she said that.  Also: FU, because she would say FU.

First of all, I love me some plant-based diet; I've been on one since 1988 or so. Hey!  I wrote a book about veganism in American culture and am married to a super successful vegan chef.

Second of all, we have no actual intel on what happened to Fisher.  Third, this is the most sexist shit I can imagine.  Did he do this when George Michael died of confirmed heart failure?  Or when Ricky Harris died of a heart attack? No?  Right.  Because Neal Barnard sees Carrie Fisher's death as an "in" to target women who should be vegan to avoid heart attack.  Nothing is more patronizing or infuriating for yours truly than this noise.

When I checked out of the hospital after nearly a week stay post massive heart attack caused by SCAD, a genetic variable that no one thought to research until -- gasp! -- the last 20 years, I was one of the lucky ones who survived what is normally called a widow maker  Most cases of SCAD, prior to Sharonne Hayes's EXTREMELY important study of it, had been discovered post-mortem, because most of us died before being diagnosed. 

Here's my heart attack.  Those really weird things at the bottom of the page?  That ECG pattern is called "tombstoning."  Because you don't come back from those.

Yup: this is me, 10 minutes from "nite, nite."

Can I get a "hell, yeah?"

Where is the research on women's heart attacks?  When I left the hospital, I got a brochure -- illustrated! -- about how to play golf post-heart attack and how to get the wife to clean the house.  

Hey, beeatach: I need for you to vacuum the living room.  Cool?

If Neal Barnard would like to talk to me about my experience with SCAD, as a VEGAN woman with NO risk factors who nearly died, then he should email me (lwright@email.wcu.edu).  I would love for him and every other cardiologist in the country to examine and understand the ways in which women die from their fucked up hearts.  And many of us die regardless of the care we take.

But shaming a dead woman and trying to get the rest of your readership to go vegan because of an undiagnosed medial issue?  For that, my friend, you should be ashamed.

And, here's my letter to you.  Peace, from a person who survived a heart attack that very likely would have killed you.

Hi Neal,
I'm a vegan woman who nearly died from SCAD in 2013. I find the medical profession's treatment of women's heart isses to be unbelievably sexist -- and I think that your article is contributing to that sexism, even as it's simultaneously unbelievably inconsiderate of Fisher's death. We have no idea what caused her to die; many of my fellow SCAD survivors feel that it might well be SCAD, and if you have SCAD, it's not your fault. Not that she should be made to be a fault regardless.

I have been vegetarian since 1988 and vegan since 2000. I am a long distance runner with no history of tobacco use or subtance abuse, and I nearly died on October 25, 2015 due to a spontaneous coronary artery dissection (which was diagnosed finally after I sought a 3rd opinion from Dr. Sharonne Hayes at the Mayo Clinic a year later).

I'm in a FB group for SCAD survivors -- along with 1000+ other people, mostly really, really heath-conscious women who have had at least one and sometimes multiple heart attacks, many of them massive (mine was a widow maker) despite our best efforts. If you'd like to read my about my heart or my veganism, you can do so here: http://veganbodyproject.blogspot.com/.../hillarys-health.... And here's a link to my most recent book: http://www.ugapress.org/.../books/the_vegan_studies_project

If you'd like to get more information about SCAD, about the ways that it's almost entirely unique to otherwise healthy (even vegan) women, please feel free to contact me. Your readers are welcome as well: lwright@email.wcu.edu
Thanks,
Dr. Laura Wright, Ph.D.
Professor of English

Hillary's Health and my Heart Attack

When a friend called and told me that Hillary Clinton nearly collapsed after having to leave a September 11 memorial service early, I braced myself for the wave of misogyny that would follow.  And then it came crashing down, just as expected.  The media pounced; Hillary's health was now a major issue.  Tom Brokaw announced that she should see a neurologist.  My first thought?  She got overheated.  And: leave her alone.

When she revealed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a few days prior, the narrative shifted again, this time to how her refusal to reveal that diagnosis was further evidence of the fact that she's not honest.  There was immediate speculation that maybe she has pneumonia, or maybe she's hiding something worse since, you know, she lies about everything.

You know the reason why Hillary didn't tell the world that she had pneumonia?  She says that she really didn't think that pneumonia was that big of a deal.  And you know why?  Because women are really good at convincing themselves and everyone around them that they are totally fine when they totally aren't.  And you know why that's the case?  Strap in and I'll tell you.

Exactly.

Women work when they are sick because they have to.  They have to take care of their families, they have to provide for their children, and if they value their jobs, they can never -- under any circumstances -- appear weak.  Illness in a woman who works is an indication that she can't handle her job, that she's too frail, too constitutionally incapable.  The speculation and scrutiny to which working women are subjected when they are sick, when they do actually have to miss work, is disproportionate to what men have to endure when they succumb to illness.  And women know this.  

Remember when Regan had colon cancer? How about when Bush the first threw up on Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi?  

Here you go.

Presidential hopefuls Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain all had cancer prior to their bids for office. And let's not ever forget that Dick Cheney had a letter of resignation ready to give to W. because he thought his heart was a goner and that he could die at pretty much any moment.  Bill Clinton?  Good lord, already.  The man was effectively trying to eat himself to death while he was in office. Donald Trump has produced an absurd supposed doctor's letter attesting to his fitness for office. 

And Hillary has pneumonia, a ailment that can be treated with antibiotics, and it's a national crisis, a clear testament to why a woman can't serve as commander and chief.  And it hits way too close to home for me.

In October of 2013, when I was 43-years-old, I had a massive heart attack that nearly killed me.  Before I go further with the details, let me tell you a few things about myself.  I have been a vegan for 15 years and a vegetarian for 20 years prior; I don't smoke, and I am a long distance runner.  My cholesterol is great, and I have no risk factors.  I am an English professor, and at the time of the heart attack, I was working in a administrative capacity as the Department Head of the largest academic department at the university where I work.  It was a stressful gig to say the least, and it was a job that I had wanted to do for a single three-year term.  I was in my second semester of that term at the time of the attack.

I was at work when I had the symptoms, the classic ones, the crushing chest pain, pain in my arms and jaw, nausea, sweating.  Of course I tried to talk myself out of what was happening because I was totally convinced that there was no way that I was having a heart attack.  I. Tried. To. Walk. It. Off.  No biggie.  Probably just a pulled muscle or something.

And then I ended up on a helicopter ride to the nearest cardiac hospital, which was 50 miles away.

Here's MAMA, the Mountain Area Medical Airlift.

The next day, my cardiologist told me just how bad it had been, how very close I came to dying, how difficult the surgery had been. How touch and go.  And he also told me that the only reason that I survived that widow maker -- so named because it lays men to waste -- was because I was so strong  and so healthy.  He told me not to return to work that semester.  

I was back in my office a week later.  I didn't even have to cancel a single class because I was only teaching a graduate course that met once per week.

No big deal.  Just par for the course.  It's what women do -- and I was super conscious of that.  I was back because not to go back would have meant the end of my ability to do any further administrative work at my university.  I would have been deemed too weak, too frail, and too unfit for such work.  Should I have gone back? Absolutely not.  But I went back anyway, and I finished out my term, and, as I had always planned, I returned to being faculty. 

But despite the sheer fortitude that should have been made evident by that action, I was still told by a no doubt well-meaning male colleague that I shouldn't plan to pursue further administrative positions because another term in the one I'd just completed would probably kill me. Woah, I thought, and then I explained that (as he already knew) that my heart attack turned out to be the result of a genetic predisposition that lead to a spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), a condition that affects otherwise super healthy women, that causes a SPONTANEOUS -- as in not-related-to-my-job -- tear in the lining of an artery, which leads to blood not being able to pass through, which leads to a clot, which leads, very often, to death. Not for me, though, I reminded him: I was back to work in a week. 

Bow down to the badass that is me, already.

Men's health issues are battle scars, evidence of developed character, of strength and survival.  Women's are evidence of frailty, even when we survive them.  Even when most men wouldn't be able to survive them.

I should be clear and note -- and I'm stealing this from a friend on Facebook -- that if Hillary's aids Weekend at Bernie-ed her body around for the rest of the election cycle, I'd happily vote for her corpse over the vileness that is Donald Trump.  But my bet is that she'll be fine, actually better than fine (did you notice that she had pneumonia and was still out there working 16 hour days?  That's not weak; that actually superhuman), no matter what the press might have us believe.

Oh my god...this actually exists.

I survived a heart attack because I am strong and, probably, because I'm a woman.  Hillary continues to survive hit after hit after hit for the same reasons.  I hope she gets better soon, and that at some point, we might see fit to let women actually be sick without also deciding that they aren't fit to lead. 

Dear Appeals People at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina

Appeals Department

Level 1

P.O. Box 30055

Durham, NC 27702

RE: Denial of benefits (reference #: ZE-140429)

13 August 2016

Dear Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina:

On October 25, 2013, at the age of 43, I had a massive myocardial infarction that nearly killed me, did irreversible damage to my heart, and caused me acute psychological distress, which manifested itself as PTSD, depression, and anxiety.  After receiving conflicting medical diagnoses from two cardiologists in North Carolina (neither of which was a women’s heart expert), I sought at third opinion from women’s heart specialist Dr. Sharonne Hayes at the Mayo Clinic, where I was definitively diagnosed with Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD), a genetic disorder that causes often fatal and spontaneous shredding of the lining of the arteries.

SCAD predominantly affects healthy women with no risk factors whatsoever – I am a long distance runner, non-smoker, long-time vegetarian, for example – and has only recently been studied, in large part because of discriminatory preexisting assumptions and attitudes about women and heart disease/attack.  For my heart, I take a low dose ace inhibitor, which takes some of the stress off of my damaged heart and allows the healthy part of my heart not to work as hard, and a daily low-dose aspirin.  For my anxiety, depression, and PTSD, along with seeking psychological therapy, I have tried Zoloft, Prozac, and Lexapro, with varying degrees of success.

At my annual physical in July of this year, I discussed with my doctor, Laurie LeMauviel, my continued struggles with the physical and psychological aspects of my heart attack; I don’t believe that the mind and body can be disaggregated and disengaged from one another, and I remain troubled that Western medicine (and Western insurance – even after the Affordable Care Act did significant work to address that issue) consistently refuse to recognize that treatment of one necessarily impacts the other.  My blood work indicated the my B12 levels were very low, and, given my battles with depression and anxiety and my seeming inability to find the correct medication to help me with those, Dr. LeMauviel suggested genetic testing for variants in my MTHFR.  Two abnormalities were diagnosed after this testing, and my knowledge of those abnormalities and their implications is absolutely medically necessary.  Here’s why:

The variations noted (677T and 1298C) are responsible for several factors that impact both my physical and mental health.  First, these variants are responsible for my body’s inability to properly absorb certain B vitamins, primarily B6 and B12, and this lack of absorption is probably the cause of some of my struggle with depression and anxiety.  Second, low levels of B vitamins contribute to elevated levels of homocysteine in the blood, which have been directly linked to increased risk for heart attack – including SCAD related heart attack.  This test may very well save my life.

I am concerned that this denial of benefits for this testing as “not medically necessary” is based on a failure to understand or appreciate the value of mental health in the service of physical health and vice versa.  Further, since being diagnosed with SCAD, I have been as vocal an advocate as possible for increased understanding and study of the ways that women have heart attacks, why women have heart attacks, and how the medical and insurance communities can more appropriately and responsibly respond to women’s heart attacks.  It is my sincere hope that this letter will do some positive work in the service of the discrimination that women have long faced, from medical providers and from insurers, with regard to heart and mental health.

Sincerely,

Laura Wright

Cc: Wayne Goodwin, NC Commissioner of Insurance

Vegan Heart Attack

Plush heart cell given to me by a friend. Complete with heart beat sound.

Exactly five months ago, I suffered a massive heart attack and almost died.  It happened at the beginning of a run, before I'd taken more than 20 steps, and what caused it still remains largely mysterious, a source of debate among the various cardiologists I've seen since then, the subject of a paper delivered at a convention by one of them.  The facts are these: I am a 43-year-old woman, a long-time long-distance runner, a long-time vegan.  I am a combination of things that constitute exactly the kind of person who never has a heart attack, who, at least ostensibly, has no risk factors whatsoever.

The kind of person who should be a poster child for all the things that one should do to avoid having a heart attack.

I had a clot.  It was huge.  An MRI and ultrasounds of my legs and heart revealed it to be the singular clot in my entire body.  I have a paten foramen ovale, a very common birth defect that enables blood to flow between the left and right atria.  It's something I discovered after the heart attack when the doctor pumped fizzy water into a vein in my arm and we watched on the ECG screen as the bubbles cross from one side to the other.

A hole in my heart.

This is my heart attack

One specialist tells me to fix it; another says not to.  I know that I need a third opinion, but so far, I haven't gotten around to getting one -- and this is in large part due to the fact that I don't believe that anyone else will know anything further.  I have grown to believe that none of us, no matter how well trained, knows much about what makes us work and what makes us break, particularly when things  break in the wrong people at the wrong time.  All is so speculative and unclear as to drive one into a complete existential mid-life crisis, which is exactly where I find myself.  I'm an English professor.  I study language and metaphor. The fact that I have a hole in my heart seems entirely right to me.  It's the space that I've never been able to fill; it's the endless tangible ache that I feel for everything nonhuman (and human) that suffers.

The surgeon went in through the femoral artery in my right leg.  I was awake the whole time, having been airlifted from the regional hospital in Western North Carolina near the university where I work, which is where I was when I had the heart attack.  I begged the doctor not to make me ride in the helicopter, so terrified I am of flying; he said I wouldn't make it if I went in an ambulance.  He gave me an Atavan to help ease my nerves. In the hospital in Asheville, the surgeon shaved my pubic hair; I was embarrassed because he was incredibly cute.  He talked to me throughout the surgery, and a screen displayed what was happening.  I had to turn my head to the left to watch the movie of the angioplasty.  At one point, the doctor laughed at something I said.  I have no idea what it was.

After, I hemorrhaged and nearly bled out through the hole in my leg.  I nearly died a second time, and the next day, the people -- nurses and doctors -- who must have met me before, during, and after the surgery, came by to tell me that they couldn't believe I'd survived.  This is a memory I have returned to often since October 25: that no one believed that I hadn't died, that I should have died.  That my life after October 25 constitutes a complete surprise.

Flowers from friends and family (notice stealthy cat foot just behind the yellow ones)

The first nightmare that I had happened about two weeks after I got out of the hospital.  I was on a gurney, heading into a dark tunnel. It's not a very inventive metaphor, I'm afraid, but it must be a universal one.  I knew that if I closed my eyes, I would be dead and that there would be nothing more.  I fought and fought to stay awake in the dream.  And then I woke up.  I'm suffering from PTSD, an apparent after effect of so much trauma, and one that's only now being linked to heart attack survivors.

Over the course of my life, my body has undergone serious trauma, most (but not all) of it at my own hands. I had an eating disorder for over a decade, and I have consistently ingested into my body (often in large quantities) things that have sped up or slowed down my heart, damaged as it already was by the fact that I existed in a nearly starved state for years and years. I feel a responsibility to my heart now, but I refuse to feel at fault for what happened. I feel sad for my heart, the small animal that I've seen on the ECG screen several times since the heart attack, part of it frozen and immobile, likely forever, from the lack of blood it received between the attack and the time that the clot was dissolved. Valves opening and closing, moving like the legs of some bear cub running and running towards some unreachable embrace.

Carol Adams came to WCU a week and a half after I had the heart attack.  I'd invited her, had arranged for her visit, and I showed up, my heart PVC-ing like crazy, to introduce her prior to her talk on her book The Sexual Politics of Meat. I wasn't supposed to go back to work until after Thanksgiving.  After I introduced her, I thought I might have another heart attack.  No one knows this.  My heart attack has been a study in its own sexual politics, all the literature given to me in the hospital clearly aimed at men in mid-life or older; the first meal I was offered when I awoke the next morning was a bowl of beef broth.  The disconnect between who I am, the food I eat (and don't), and the reality that beef and foods made from animals are more likely to cause heart attacks than anything I've ever done all have constituted the grim irony with which I continue to view my circumstances.

I worry that I've somehow betrayed veganism, that people will read this and think that it's because I am vegan that this happened.  And maybe they'd be right.

But I doubt it.

So often, when I wake up from the nightmares that are now becoming less and less frequent, I want to hold my heart in my hands and comfort it the way I would any other abused or harmed or suffering animal.  And this is the way I'll be able to make sense of what's happened to me, even if the surgeons can't, to care for the creature that keeps running towards me, wounded and vulnerable.

Detail from a portrait I painted of my heart