Rosie O’Donnell feels ‘lucky to be here’ after heart attack
August has not been a very good month for Rosie O’Donnell. Just weeks after revealing that her fiancée Michelle Rounds was diagnosed with a rare disease, the comedian shared her own health scare on Monday when she announced on her blog that she had suffered a heart attack the previous week. O’Donnell, 50, credits her quick thinking – she popped a Bayer aspirin, which claims in its commercials to prevent the progression of existing cardiovascular disease – for saving her life. "They call this type of heart attack/the Widow Maker/i am lucky to be here," she wrote.
Mother-of-four O’Donnell says it all began on August 14 after she helped “an enormous woman” get out of her car in a parking lot in Nyack, New York. Hours later, her chest and arms were throbbing, she felt nauseous, and her skin was clammy. "maybe this is a heart attack," she wrote on her blog. "i googled womens heart attack symptoms/i had many of them/but really? – i thought – naaaa."
Although she did take a Bayer aspirin, O’Donnell did not call 911 for help, which she added is the same thing hundreds of thousands of women do wrong each year during a heart attack, which eventually kills them. "by some miracle i was not one of them," she wrote. "know the symptoms ladies/listen to the voice inside/the one we all so easily ignore/CALL 911/save urself."
After being admitted to the hospital, the funny lady’s doctors discovered that her coronary artery was 99 percent blocked, so they inserted a stent. “She is now home and resting comfortably,” O’Donnell’s rep said in a statement. “She is very, very lucky."
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