This morning, soap icon Susan Lucci (ex-Erica Kane, “All My Children”) revealed during an interview with “Good Morning America’s” Amy Robach that she recently underwent an emergency heart procedure for the second time that resulted in stent being put in to open up a blockage in one of her arteries.
“I was having kind of a shortness of breath,” Lucci told Robach of feeling discomfort around her ribcage and back, symptoms similar to her experience from three years ago.
“I thought, ‘This is crazy. These are the same kind of symptoms that I had three years ago but it can’t be,'” Lucci noted. “But when I lay down, I started to feel a sharp coming-and-going pain in my jaw.”
After calling her doctor, who told her to go to the emergency room, Lucci was told after several tests that she experienced an 80% blockage in one of her arteries due to plaque buildup. As a result, Lucci was rushed to a cardiac catheterization lab where she had the new stent put in.
“She wasn’t having a heart attack this time and she wasn’t unstable,” said Lucci’s doctor, Dr. Richard Shlofmitz, chairman of cardiology at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York. “But she had symptoms that were certainly concerning to me that something might be wrong.”
Had Lucci waited any longer her symptoms could have gotten worse which would have resulted in a major emergency, he said.
As part of her ongoing collaboration with the American Heart Association and its Go Red for Women initiative, Lucci is urging other women to take better care of their bodies, saying, “Listen to your heart and act on [the symptoms]. Give yourself permission to take good care of yourself. Be your own best friend. Be your own advocate. You’ll save your life.”
Watch Lucci’s interview with “Good Morning America” below.