Darlene Love, often known as Danny Glover’s wife “Lethal Weapon,” had a heart attack this summer just hours before going on stage. — Click to Tweet.
She experienced the heart attack as stomach pains and acid reflux, so she asked her husband for an aspirin and went on stage. After completing her performance, she went to bed.
The next day, however, the pain got worse, and she couldn’t bear it any longer. Her husband Alton rushed her to the hospital, where her condition was assessed. The 71-year-old singer was shocked to hear the news: she had just had a heart attack.
As it turns out, the choice she made to go to the hospital was crucial. If she’d stayed home and taken another aspirin instead, she’d have died shortly afterward.
Love’s Recovery
Darelene Love was released from the hospital a few days later, just a day before her birthday. Shortly afterward, Darlene told a radio station she was “home and doing fine. They [the doctors] told [her she would be] fine a couple of days.
Just a few days after that, she was performing a sold-out show in New York on August 6th.
Recognizing a Heart Attack
Many women are surprised to find out they can have a heart attack without even realizing it. In fact, they’re completely taken aback that the symptoms they mistook for acid reflux, the flu, or some other minor illness are actually life-threatening signs of heart disease.
Heart disease is actually the number one killer of women, though it’s often not recognized, according to the American Heart Association.
But women can work to fight heart disease by minimizing their risk, which means eating a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables, while reducing processed foods and fatty, greasy dishes.
Women should also educate themselves on the symptoms of a heart attack. They can be quite different depending on the person, and are sometimes more subtle in women than in men. According to Heart.Org, these are the symptoms a woman should recognize:
- Uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain in the center of your chest. It lasts more than a few minutes, or goes away and comes back.
- Pain or discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach.
- Shortness of breath with or without chest discomfort.
- Other signs such as breaking out in a cold sweat, nausea or lightheadedness.
- As with men, women’s most common heart attack symptom is chest pain or discomfort. But women are somewhat more likely than men to experience some of the other common symptoms, particularly shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting and back or jaw pain.
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