A 44-year-old spin instructor had a major heart attack while teaching a class. She says she missed a subtle warning sign.
- Ratona Harr, a fitness instructor, felt an "explosion" in her chest while teaching a spin class.
- Her students called 911, and she soon learned she'd suffered a "widow-maker" heart attack.
Ratona Harr was teaching her regular spin class in 2021 when she felt an "explosion" in her chest.
Then, when she reached for a weight, she noticed her left arm was numb. The rest of her body soon began to lose feeling, and sweat poured off her, Harr, then 44, told Today.com.
Harr, who owns Full Body Fitness & Yoga in northern Kentucky and teaches at CycleBar, tried to walk toward the bathroom but struggled to breathe and keep her balance. By then, some of her students, who were nurses, called 911.
The emergency medical team recognized she was having a heart attack and rushed her to the hospital.
"Class started at 8:30 a.m., they called 911 at 8:56, and by 9:33 I'm getting two stents in my heart because I have 100% blockage in the main artery in my heart," Harr told Today.com.
What she described is known as a "widow-maker" heart attack, which occurs when blood flow is completely blocked in the left anterior descending artery. The term reflects how fatal the condition can be: It typically leads to sudden cardiac arrest, which kills close to 90% of people who suffer from it outside of the hospital, according the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation.
Harr survived, and shared her story to make others aware of the early warning sign she missed.
Harr felt off a few days before her heart attack
Three days before the attack, Harr felt pressure and discomfort in her chest while teaching class. She said it felt like a "disruption" in her body that she'd never experienced before. She laid low the rest of the day and got a massage the next day, but didn't seek other help.
"I feel like, had I gone to the doctor that Wednesday, we could have avoided a lot of all this stuff that happened later," Harr told Today.com. Still, she didn't have the lifestyle factors that raise the risk of widow-maker heart attacks, like high blood pressure, poor diet, and a lack of exercise.
According to the American Heart Association, sometimes the warning signs of a heart attack start slowly. They can include discomfort, pain, or pressure in the chest, arms, back, neck, jaw or stomach; shortness of breath; cold sweats; nausea; and lightheadedness.
Harr had a long recovery, and still has congestive heart failure
Harr's recovery included wearing a LifeVest, an external defibrillator that can shock the heart into a normal heart rhythm, for about five months. She also underwent cardiac rehab to build back her heart strength and cardiac ablation, in which doctors use heat or cold to treat an abnormal rhythm.
She still has congestive heart failure, or when the heart doesn't pump blood as well as it should, and has to keep her heart rate below 150 beats per minute when teaching fitness classes.
She's also had to overcome the anxiety of returning ot the studio. "I used to have this mindset like, this is the place I almost died," Harr said to Today.com. "And then one day, I had this moment and it was like, this is the place that saved my life."
Other healthy woman have told Insider about their surprising heart attacks
Brittany Williams was only 24 when she suffered a cardiac arrest, an electrical problem that stops the heart from beating, in a New York City bar. At the time, she ran five miles daily and ate a healthy diet. But she later learned she had a heart rhythm disease that had led to the event.
"I just thought heart disease happened to the elderly or heavy smokers and heavy drinkers, not young adult athletes like me," Williams told Insider of her diagnosis. "I just never in a million years would picture myself going into cardiac arrest."
Wakisha Stewart, a nursing assistant in her early 30s, told Insider last year about going to the ER two weeks after childbirth with chest pain, numbness, and vomiting. While her symptoms were at first dismissed as anxiety, clinicians later found she'd suffered a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or when a tear forms in a heart blood vessel.
In Stewart's case, it completely blocked blood flow in the left anterior descending artery, leading to a widow-maker heart attack. She'd always been an athlete and had no history of heart disease.
"I want to let people know cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of new moms," she told Insider. "I want the medical community to start opening up their eyes and not accusing women or misdiagnosing women as having panic attacks or anxiety attacks, because it could be more."