Video: The Miraculous Journey To Heart Health

STARKVILLE, Miss(WCBI)—A evening out to celebrate turned into a frightening ordeal for a member of our WCBI family.

Sunrise anchor Bill Gamel and his wife, Susan had just arrived at a wedding reception when she suffered a heart attack. That was just a few weeks ago. Today finishing up cardiac rehab.

February is heart month and a good time to share Susan’s story and reminders to listen to your body.

“I mean when she first went down, of course, I caught her half way down and laid her on the floor. And fortunately there was a doctor standing right beside me and he started working on her immediately,”Susan’s Husband Bill Gamel.

Susan and Bill both call that quick work “divine intervention” and it likely saved her life.

But the danger had started long before that night.

“I was suffering from what I thought was just really bad case of indigestion even my arm hurt a little bit. I treated it for indigestion actually and realized that I did need to see a Doctor but I was going to wait till the next week and so I just waited a little too long,” said Heart Attack Survivor  Susan Gamel.

Susan’s heart stopped.

“I was in  the cab of the ambulance they started putting here in the back of the ambulance heard one of the doctors say we lost her pulse and she stopped breathing. well that’s when I went from praying to begging and apparently god answers begging too,”said Bill Gamel.

She coded that night and doctors eventually put her on a ventilator. Miraculously, the next morning she was breathing on her own and well on the way to recovery.

Elizabeth Varco sees patients, particularly women, in the O.C.H. Rehab Facility every day with similar stories.

” Women don’t have the same classical symptoms. They have a lot of discomfort in the back. They can have upper abdominal pain they complain of shortness of breath or difficulty doing their usual daily activities,”said O.C.H. Rehab Director Elizabeth Varco.

Varco says both women and men are susceptible to heart disease, but taking preventative measures is key.

“Exercising, eating a healthy diet, watching your cholesterol, getting their blood pressure checked by the physician and decreasing stress watching our body weight are all risk factors that promote heart disease,” said Varco.

For Susan and other cardiac patients, a big part of the recovery includes rehab.

“It’s an exercise program where we monitor the patients E.K.G. as their exercising we monitor their blood pressure but we are also an education program we talk a lot about risk factors for heart disease,”said Varco.

Susan says the most important lesson she’s learned is that no one is safe from a heart attack.

“Just be proactive and see a Dr. it’s better to be safe than sorry I wish I had done that,”said Susan Gamel.

Varco emphasized that for men, symptoms of a heart attack can range from chest pains to discomfort that can radiate to the jaw and upper shoulders and down the left arm.