WILL YOU BE JOINING US?

Her name was Mary Jean and she leaned over to talk to me as I waited for my first rehab orientation on Monday. "Will you be joining us?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "I had a heart attack last Sunday, and I left the hospital on Wednesday."

"Oh," she said, and paused. I didn't wait for her to ask what I guessed was coming.

"I'm 37," I volunteered. But she didn't say I was too young to have a heart attack, or even act that shocked or surprised. She told me that she was 86, had had bypass surgery and now had a new valve and a pacemaker. And then she said, "You'll like it here. The people are very nice."

They are, and I do like it. Even though the effort is light, it is exercise and movement and it feels good. I'm supervised, monitored, checked, re-checked, and scored. Someone tells me what to do, when, for how long, and at what intensity. Perfect.

We work out in a class (I'm in the MWF 3 p.m. group) and everyone knows each other; they've been together for weeks. They are all at least two decades older than me. Three men and one other woman.

Today was my second day. While we were on the recumbent bikes, Patrick (who had bypass 9 weeks ago), leaned over and said, "You were cruisin' pretty good there on the treadmill," and I shrugged and smiled.

"Well, I was a runner until about a week ago," I said. (At this point the physiologist/trainer monitoring the screens with all our heart rates on it piped up "and you will be again!" Love her.)

"You didn't have heart surgery did you?" Patrick asked.

"Yes, I had a heart attack and now I have a stent."

"But you're too young!"

"Yep, I'm a poster child for it can happen to anyone," I said with a smile, my new stock response for the shocked. Obviously and unfortunately I am not too young and neither are the many others like me. I saw this fact on a poster in the heart clinic: "62% of all people living with heart disease are under 65."

A few minutes later Patrick asked me if my symptoms were indeed different because I'm a woman and I ended up telling the story to the whole group. That the pain started Friday (maybe even Thursday) and I took Advil and explained it away for two days. That it hurt in my back, between my shoulder blades and spread to both arms and shoulders, even my hands (had it been the left arm only, things may have moved faster). That it took nearly 10 hours to diagnose even at the hospital, because every test -- EKG, CT, X-ray, echocardiogram -- came back normal. The only signs were the blood enzyme test (and overtraining was even discussed as a culprit there), the pain, and my family history.

I don't mind telling the story and I hope people share it so that other women listen to their bodies and advocate for quick, accurate diagnosis and treatment. I would like to imagine the trainers telling their friends, or my fellow patients telling their daughters, so that if a woman they know has a heart attack, she too will be joining us at rehab.

We're very nice, and she will like it.