MARK PATTON: She has heart disease on the run
11/8/05
By
MARK PATTON
NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER
Janet Wolf could barely walk five steps when
this year began. But on Saturday, even five kilometers weren't
a problem.
She finished 211th out of 330 runners in the News-Press
5K. But the truth is, Janet won.
She knew it the moment she dashed across the finish line,
just 11 months after suffering a full-blown heart attack.
"At that point, I don't think it would've mattered if
I had walked or run across," said the 51-year-old mother
of three.
The year's journey wasn't easy.
Wolf, a former Goleta school board trustee, suffered congestive
heart failure on Dec. 7. She couldn't have been more shocked
if she had been witnessing the original Pearl Harbor Day.
"I was pretty active," said Wolf, a kinesiology major
who had once taught P.E. "I went to the gym periodically.
I played roller hockey.
"It was so ironic, because there I was, 50 years old and
thinking, 'I'm going to get killed by a hockey puck, or
a stick.'"
Instead, it was a combination of diet and genetics that
nearly got her. Her father needed bypass surgery at 52 when
an artery, the same as Janet's, became blocked.
She had been suffering from angina for four days, thinking
it was just a bad cause of heartburn, when her husband Harvey
found her during the middle of the night, leaning over the
kitchen counter in extreme pain.
"He just said, 'I'm taking you to the hospital,'" Janet
recalled. "By the time I got there, the artery was 100 percent
blocked."
A medicated stent was inserted. But even then, Janet remained
in denial until her third day in the critical care unit,
when a nurse took her on her first walk.
"She told me, 'You can only take five steps,'" she recalled.
"I thought, 'Oh my God, I really must have had a heart attack!'"
The nurses still had to slow Janet down: "I'd be walking
with Harvey to the elevator, and they'd tell me I was walking
too fast."
But she also changed directions with her diet, slowly
but surely shedding 35 pounds to get back to her wedding-day
weight of 120.
By April, Janet was ready to join the Momentum 4 Life
training group. And even when she learned she had breast
cancer just two months later, it couldn't slow her down.
"I felt real lucky, because it was caught early," she
said. "They didn't have to do chemo, just radiation-hormone
therapy. I'd go to Cottage Hospital six days a week, and
on two of those days I'd go to cardiac rehab, so it was
kind of convenient."
Janet ran a four-mile race to benefit the Goleta Education
Foundation in September. A month later, she attended a four-day
Science and Leadership symposium at the Mayo Clinic, training
to become an official spokeswoman for WomenHeart.
"Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, and my mission
is to prevent this from happening to other women," she said.
(To contact her about a speaking engagement, call 967-1636).
When Janet ran Saturday's 5K with husband Harvey, it reminded
her of her measured walks to the hospital elevator not long
ago.
"As we got closer to the end," she said, "he asked, 'Well,
do you want to kick it up a notch?'"
It filled Janet's heart with joy to be able to say yes.
Mark Patton's column appears on Tuesday, Thursday and
Saturday. E-mail: mpatton@newspress.com
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