Wait that ass up in the morning Breakfast Club Yep, Charlamagne to God just hilarious. DJ Envy had to step out for a second, but we got some special guests, doctor.
Leandrews La Bird and Tara Robinson.
Leandre is the director of CDC's Office of Health Equity and Tara is the founder and CEO of the Black Heart Association, And since February is Heart Health Month, we had to have them up here today.
How are you good morning, how are you feeling here?
Glad to be able to talk about black women's heart health to day with you. Absolutely share a little bit of data. Data's not new, and we really are here to talk more about what black women can do and how our whole community can support Black women in having healthier hearts and healthier lives.
Well, what is the CDC Foundations Lived to the Beat campaign For those that don't know, Yeah, so, the Live to.
The Beat campaign is a web based campaign that really targets African Americans with things that we can do in order to protect our health and our heart health. It has lots of resources, lots of videos, It's very culturally based, very much the things that we can relate to in our own communities, and so it's been around for three years. We just invite all of your listeners and your viewers to go to live too theb dot org forward slash Heart to Heart. We're gonna talk today a lot about
the Heart to Heart Challenge. Yeah, So the Heart to Heart Challenge focuses on particularly Black women. Even though heart disease is the leading cause of death for all black people, and heart disease is the leading cause of death for all women. It kills more more women than all forms of cancer combined. And so what we want to be able to do is to encourage black women to get involved with the campaign and the challenge, follow some simple steps and really start to just be more empowered to
take care of themselves. Yeah, and to prioritize self care. That's a big theme. So we say that self care is healthcare. We want to really focus on that today.
Yeah, I love that.
Did you so? Which one?
I want to know?
One of 'alls survived three heart attacks?
Power was you? Girl?
That has to be well, it's amazing that you're still here in front of me, But like, did you know something was wrong before?
I didn't?
My symptoms started in twenty thirteen, my left arm winnum and and you would think, based on those two symptoms that I would say, oh, it's my heart, but no, I'm always in touch with the healthcare system, you know,
going to the doctor when I'm supposed to. And so me and my husband said, well, maybe I just sleep on this side too much, you know, to start self diagnosing, and so I did that, and then so I said, well, I'll wait to January to go follow up with my primary care and thinking I had time, not knowing then that someone was dying every eighty seconds from a heart attack. And so I went to my doctor and I said, hey,
you know, these things are happening to me. My left arms going on, my feet are darker, you know, I'm tired, my neck and she.
Said, well, maybe you're just stressed.
Your doctor.
My doctor said that yes, and so I said, well, maybe I am. Because I'm a mother, i'm a wife, I wear all these many hats as many women do. And so I left there thinking I was just stressed. She made no connection to my heart being a possible issue. So God kept me from January to April. April tenth, I woke up at two o'clock in the morning, I still had all those symptoms times ten and then went to the er. By the time I rid that I felt much better, was dismissed and told them to follow
my primary care. And then the next day in my classroom, had another one. Then I'm going back and forth with the cardiovascular a docter that I should stay because they wasn't finding anything on their test. But then I was released at eleven at four o'clock the next day going back having a massive heart attack. So were they not doing the right test? The word I believe that they were doing the test that they know to do. That's
what I have to believe to be okay. But I think as data shows that most women don't show like men, present like men that with heart attacks. But for me, I had the textbook symptoms. And so we know as black women, we face other issues with healthcare as far as bias and racism. So I faced those two things is going through my ordeals. So we have to know where we stand and we have to know what our risk factors are. And that's why this campaign is so important.
I've done a million different I've done every single heart test that you can possibly do right, So even when they did I don't know the technical term for, but when they put the ink inside of you and they can look inside your arteries.
Now I did discress tests, but this is.
When they put the like the dyeing and it makes you warm, and then they can look inside your heart vibs and see if there's any blockage and like you whittle make it.
They didn't do that for you.
I went through the calf lab during my massive heart attack. They didn't do that before because I guess maybe they were coming back to back and I feel like they didn't do enough. I'm sure there's other things they could have done, but I didn't have that done until I went through. Well, I didn't do that part. I went through the calf lab and then that's when I went
into sudden depth. I ended up dying that day, losing my life on to Heaven coming back here, and so none of that happened because at that point it was too late. This I'm in crisis at this moment, and so they did the basic test, your EKG, your cat scan, your heart enzyme test. That's what was done when I went through er. Nothing more that you would see at a cardiovascular doctors forgive me.
I'm stupid.
I just realized I thought you had three separate heart attacks.
It was all at one time.
No, I had one April, tenth April, eleventh, April the next day.
Yeah yeah, and you said you died with the heaven.
Yeah, yeah, you saw heaven. I did.
Please elaborate if you don't, please.
I don't want to take the interview from little to the be. But so what happened was I thank god it was a sister in there that may help me be very comfortable.
So it's important. No, in the emergency in the I'm glad you would.
Oh my god.
So the nurse I remember her because you're up during the entire procedure, and so she was like, he's gonna tamper with your heart. You're gonna feel a little discomfort, but it's gonna be okay. She was from New Orleans, so she had that thick accent. But it made me feel very comfortable. And when she said that, I was just gone. And so how I knew where I was.
I could see myself and it was a perfect day if you could think of the perfect day with the perfect green gearass, perfect temperature, perfect, you know, and so vibrant everything, and I could see myself like walking, and I had this peace. And that's how I knew where I was because my mind was white clear. I wasn't worried about my children here and my husband. Nothing here was a factor for me. And so I could hear my name being called. It was called three times, and
it was the nurse. And then I knew where I was because I was on my way. I could feel that like a knowing. And then I was back here after she called my name, and I didn't realize. She was like, oh, you fell asleep on us for a second. And then when the doctor came in and said you had ninety nine percent blockage known as the wheelmaker. He said, but when you died on us, I stopped and prayed for you. And so I was lucky enough to have a doctor at that moment.
That Wow, doctor Delandris, what's the sign that something maybe wrong.
With our hearts?
Well? Terror, you know, she certainly shared some of the classic symptoms, but the other things we need to always be aware of is our numbers. What is our blood pressure level, what is our cholesterol level, what are our blood sugars? I would even say, you know, what's our weight. You know, we need to check in with our physician regularly around these things. And I wanted to just mention just a couple more reasons why black women tend to
have this higher burden of heart disease. Some of them are systemic or structural things like you know, not having access to health insurance, not having paid sickly, having lots of financial stress because black women tend to be I'm going to say overrepresented in like poverty. Yeah, and also you know, not necessarily having access to quality healthcare because of the biases that we sometimes encounter or in the
healthcare system. But the other thing that we really want to sort of elevate today is the stereotype of the strong black woman, and we want to dismantle that and start to disrupt that and really rethink what it means to be strong. So we have this long history of putting others before of us, ahead of us, of taking
care of others. We can go our way back to slavery and to the present, and so we want to give black women permission today to put themselves first fortune to really say I'm deserving of taking care of me. So we know from research that black women report higher levels of psychological stress, and we know from data that
black women have higher rates of cardiovascular disease. Overall, a Black woman is sixty percent more likely to have high blood pressure, higher rates of coronary disease, but also higher rates of stroke deaths than when we compare to non Hispanic white women. So these things taken together are our concerns. So we want to really encourage and press Black women, their families and communities to really pay attention and take charge.
Right.
So, the Heart to Heart challenge is that we're asking women to do three things. The first one is to identify a small step that they can take That could be taking a daily self care walk. It could be tracking what you're eating and your physical activity, your movement. It could be taking deep breaths, right, we need to do better and breathing and like exhaling some of this stress. And also keeping a gratitude journal, which is really surprising
has an actual health benefit. So and then knowing your numbers as I mentioned before, and then telling someone. So the second part of the campaign is to go public with the commitment that you've made to prioritize your own self care. You know, tell friends, tell family members, put it on your social media page. And then the third thing is we want the women who will participate in the campaign to celebrate that commitment by coming to Atlanta if you can. If you're in Atlanta, please come to
the Heart to Heart self care party. It's going to be on February the twenty fourth. If you can't come, you can participate virtually. But there will be like yoga demonstrations, cooking demonstrations, There'll be a comedian there because you know that laughter it's good for the heart.
It's good for our minds, which comedy.
Just like not all the community is good for your heart.
Chant she's also a survivor.
Okay, oh that's nice, but that's a good link.
Okay, gotcha.
Yeah. And then the only other thing I don't want to forget to mention in terms of a small step is when you need to speak to a professional because like your world just sort of is like unraveling. You don't feel like you can keep it all together. We want to encourage women to seek that help. There is no stigma that should be attached to that. It's okay, you know, we want we want to really encourage that, particularly in the Black community. So those are that's like
the essence of the campaign. That's why we think this is so important, you know, this year, Like I was saying, we've known for decades that certainly that high blood pressures is a big problem in the African American community. But we also know now that there are things that we can do. Yeah, we don't have to just sit with it.
I've heard that taking fish oil capsules lower as the curlesterol is that you.
You know what, I'm not really up to nate on like those kinds of supplements. And I would really encourage you to ask your position.
I would say it is good for your heart. My my position prescribed them to me. So but of course you know you want to follow with your doctor.
But yeah, hear that a lot.
Yeah, fish oil and a baby asterrod.
And then I got you got stating that night because you know, yeah, I'm born in nineteen hundred and.
Seven years I do want to answer your question.
You asked, what are the signs and what are some of the signs and symptoms. So I would say for women, it's totally different from men. You know, I was lucky enough to have the textbook symptoms, which only twenty percent of women show up at the er with the textbook symptoms, So imagine what happens to the rest of us who don't have those, and see what I got with them. With men, you usually have the textbook symptoms, but with
women it can be a belly ache. You hear women complain of both either arm being numb, you can hear fatigue, you can hear no symptoms at all. And the danger with heart disease is that it doesn't have a look, you know, and no shot to.
My counselor survivors, sisters.
But heart disease is dangerous because it looks okay, it looks like me and you dressed up and makeup. It looks like us in clothes, and that we have to, you know, change that narrative so in order to save our lives. And that's why these campaigns are lived to the beats important because when we talk about small steps, small steps is looking at your plate and saying what can I do to better manage my health?
Because yeah, I want to.
Ask you another question there about because you have the black heart association. I mean, you know, of course black people and white people we got the same organs. But is there more stressors that happen.
Of course, this is a stupid question.
What are the stressors that black people have to deal with more that probably make us more prone to heart disease?
Well, you know, we have a lot going on.
I think about this most recent Let's just think about George Floyd and us as black women, and we all heard him call for his mother. You know, those kind of things stay with us as people. So we have racism that we have to go through, we have biases that we have to go through. We don't have enough black doctors, we don't have enough resources in our community. We're at Black Heart, We're in the community every single day. My husband's at two events today and we have won
twenty eight events this month. So we're seeing that. You know, we go to areas that don't have access to food. Why, you know, why are we still here as a nation when we have we can send billions of dollars everywhere else, but why come we can't take care of our own communities right here in America. So it's a lot of things that you know, access to proper education, a lot of things are missing, and we have to come together to figure that out. No, yes, we do have the
same heartbeat? But do we have the same heartbeat when it comes to America?
Yeah, what kind of life style changes should we be making?
So things like changing our diet certainly to have less salt. We need to be more physically active. Stop smoking if that's something that you're doing.
Now, stop smoking? What it's some things? I know it's some things not for me.
No, we're talking about stop smoking cigarettes.
Okay, all right, yeah, yeah, I agree.
What about marijuana? Se marijuana good lower stress levels?
H Well, you know it's the cd see representative here. I'm gonna ask you that speak to your physician about that.
Oh.
I think it has its pros and cons.
I think in the community we definitely tell you know, we can't tell people what they should or we can say we suggest based on what you're you know, what you're going through. But I think it definitely has its pros and cons. Once we get addicted to something, then it becomes a con. So we just have to be
mindful of that balance. I think it's checks and balances and everything we do, whether it's from eating, stress, relate bad relationships, whatever it is we're doing, it's always checks and balances and having to consider our health in every decision we make throughout the day.
Yeah, and we really need to, I think, look at the root causes. So often we're self medicating, we're covering up, we're just not dealing with right, the real thing.
Yeah.
And so you know, we hope that through this campaign in particular, that women and black women will start to have some real conversations and then our whole community would start to rally because we're gonna have to save ourselves in terms of really being able to live a long and healthy life.
Yeah.
Absolutely, I know I was this kind of caterus to me as well. I don't know if there's a direct link to it, but I was born with a heart murmur, a leaky valve, and I got heart surgery at birth, but I was too small for them to go through my heart, so they went through my bag. And it hasn't bothered me over the years. It used to bother me when I was a child, when I was really really young, but since like my vision will go black sometimes like it would come right back, you know what
I mean. But I couldn't like really do too much in gym when I was in like elementary and school, elementary school and things like that, But it hasn't bothered me since then. But every now and then it'll be like like alone. You know, I always describe it like this.
I don't know if you ever heard this, but like chords get hangled up in your in your it just feels like that sometimes when I'm laying down and I have to see, you know, change positions and to your point of like sometimes like what you did when you
had your textbook symptoms, you just was like, maybe I'm tired. Maybe, like I will say, I have been afraid to go see heart disease doesn't run in my family, but I'm the only one that was born with a heart murmur or you know, a leaky valve and I had the surgery, and like I said, it hasn't really like affected me greatly since I had the surgery, but it would it bother me as a child a little bit, but I haven't had anything like alarming stuff of those little pains every now and then.
What I would say to you, but if it's enough to get your attention, then you definitely should get it checked out. And I think it's interesting that you bring up the point because we hear this in the community all the time that heart disease doesn't run in our family. But if we have high blood pressure, if we have cholesterol issues, then we have heart disease. And so we have to start connecting the dots to make it makes sense. If we're I had my heart attacks of stress. I
don't have high blood pressure, cholesterol. I still to this day don't have any of those things. But I was internalizing, going back to that strong black woman trope that we're talking about. So I think a lot of us, as black people, whether you're a black man or a woman, you internalize a lot because of pride or for whatever
reason you don't want to get it out. But I'm telling you now, if you've had high blood pressure, diabetes, or any of those things for several years, you should have already checked in with a heart specialist.
So you usually just stress.
You didn't have no plaque or nothing.
What right?
Wow?
But I did have flockage, but it was caused by my stress or my stress levels because I dealt with childhood trauma, you know, and a lot of us do. I was molested as a child, I was abused, so you got all of those situations.
I end up becoming a counselor.
But you're strapping, you know, trying to get out the hood, trying to do all these things, and when you get there and you're not healed, it's just the ticking time bump. And I set myself up for failure in that sense. Them didn't have healed things that went without fixing. Yeah, I was holding onto everything, and we hold on to a lot unforgiveness, anger, all of that, and so everything flows through our heart, nothing misses it.
Yeah, my doctor told me that I'm just fighting against genetics because he's like, my arteries just are aging faster, are aging faster than I am.
But heart did these runs in my family, Like my dad had whatever's after four.
Quadrules four, so whatever after that quintuple he had, he had that bypass surgery and my uncle's had like three or four different bipaths surgery.
So yeah, and that black heart.
We do genetics, what we do of licro protein A, so we can tell our community if they're at risk of ever having a heart attack or stroke. So we do a lot of things on that bus and we're trying to be national with it so we can take this. We take this campaign to our community as well, encouraging them to take those small steps.
How can people reach out to y'all for you know, more questions, you know, if they got more, oh, for questions and more info.
So certainly go to the website Live to Thebeat dot org forward slash Heart to Heart. That's where you can get more and more information about Live to the Beat and all of the many more strategies than we've been able to cover today. And also you can reach us through through that website that someone will follow up with you. Yeah, for sure.
What about Black Heart Association.
So we're Black Heart Association dot org and we're about to get two more buses one in Houston one and San Antonio and hopefully we'll be in national So amazing.
Oh, people need to support what y'all doing and tap in because I don't know, Heart to these the number one killer of black people in America.
Right, that's correct? Yeah? Can I just say thank you to you all for opening up this conversation, for making it real, for letting people know that it's okay to say that we're not okay, because we're not okay, but we can be better. Absolutely, but we have to start.
I've been running to the ear for as long as I can remember, because you know, I got to deal with anxiety.
So you know, when you have anxiety and you having these.
Panic attacks when you're young, you always think it's a heart attack. So I always was running to the er, you know, trying to figure out what was going on in my heart. And it wasn't until over the past year and some change when I did a whole lot of tests. I did DISARI in medical skin with doctor Puma, and that's when my mind finally was at ease.
I know what I needed to do for my heart health.
Yeah, and the fact that you bring up running to the er, don't allow them to tell you that it's not anxiety or that anxiety doesn't lead to heart issues, because it does and you can find out more about that on the Heart to Heart campaign. But it does, and those issues impact your hearts. Depression all that, you know,
impacts our hearts. So we have to be really mindful when we hang out with these things and when we go into the er, have your voice, activate your voice as power in our voices and speak up because just they will dismiss the fact that you have just just anxiety or just this. So make sure that they're doing those hard check ups when you arrive at the e R.
Thank you, Thank you, doctor Leandrews Libert. Did I pronounce that right? No, it's not fine and.
You can't be messing up the body that's going that's going to contribute to the heart.
And Tyre Robinson, thank you for joining us this morning. It's the Breakfast Club. Wait till that's up in the morning. The Breakfast Club