Caring for your heart
Woman helps educate others on signs, facts of heart disease
Georgia Brown has been slim all her life, exercised faithfully and watched what she ate.
On one hand, she would seem to be the last candidate for heart trouble; on the other hand, the way she lived may have saved her life.
After she had triple heart bypass surgery in January 2010, she said her doctor told her, “The things that were in my favor were God and my lifestyle.”
Now, just a little more than a year after her surgery, she’s back to walking her usual 4-mile walk most days of the week and enjoying her family.
Brown will be one of the guest speakers at the Capital Area Go Red for Women Luncheon, a fundraiser for the American Heart Association.
The event opens at 9:30 a.m. Feb. 9 at the Crowne Plaza with free health screenings for the public, as well as a silent auction.
A ticketed lunch program follows at 11:30 a.m., concluded by a fashion show. Models will include survivors of heart disease, including Brown.
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, according to the American Heart Association.
In fact, more women in the U.S. die of heart disease than the next four causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer, the association reports.
Only slightly more than half of women “are likely to call 911, if experiencing symptoms. And yet, 79 percent of women said they would call 911 if someone else was having a heart attack,” according to American Heart Association literature.
Brown, 77, retired in 2000 after a 43-year career at Southern University. She was the director of libraries for many years at the university, her alma mater, and 10 years before she retired she began and directed a Woman’s Studies program there.
She and her husband, Ollie J. Brown, retired principal of Capitol Middle School, have two grown, married children, local dentist Dr. Pamela Brown Daniel and former LSU basketball player Oliver Joseph Brown, now an engineer in Houston, as well as five grandchildren.
“I thought I was taking excellent care of myself,” Georgia Brown said.
“I never drank or smoked. I thought I was eating right, and I was exercising,” she said.
Nevertheless, she learned while she was still working that she had high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She began taking medication to treat those conditions and fine-tuned her diet, not eating fried foods or red meat.
In 2010, however, Brown experienced several episodes of what she thought was indigestion, sometimes waking up in the early hours of the morning feeling badly.
More than once, she said, her primary doctor ran an electrocardiogram on her, with the results always being normal.
When her symptoms persisted, however, he referred her to a cardiologist, who ordered several tests, including a heart catheterization.
Brown learned that several of the arteries in her heart were blocked and that she would need open-heart surgery, a triple bypass, to repair them.
“It went well,” Brown said.
After several weeks of rehabilitation, she was back to her active lifestyle. She speculates there may be a hereditary factor for her heart condition. She lost both her maternal grandfather and her mother to heart attacks, she said.
“We have to get rid of the stereotype that you have to be obese to have something wrong with your heart,” Brown said.
“Have checkups and watch your diet,” she said.