BY KELSEY FAVRET

news@heraldsun.com; 419-6630

DURHAM — On Friday, women across the city will wear red to spread awareness of heart disease in women.

National Wear Red Day is one way for the public to participate in February’s Heart Awareness Month.

In the United States alone, 41 million women are living with or are at risk for heart disease, said Tesca Kinard, the support group coordinator for the Durham chapter of WomenHeart.

“For every woman who dies from breast cancer, five will die from heart disease,” said Laura Haywood-Cory, an editorial assistant at Baen Books and survivor of a rare heart disease called Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection, or SCAD. Haywood-Cory said WomenHeart was a major aid in her recovery.

WomenHeart is a national organization dedicated to promoting women’s heart health. The group has been active in Durham since August 2005.

WomenHeart focuses on “constantly spreading the awareness for women’s heart disease,” Kinard said.

Women need to advocate for themselves and change parts of their lifestyles that are not heart-healthy, she said. WomenHeart helps by focusing on support, education and equality when it comes to the treatment and prevention of heart disease in women.

Part of that education is providing a network of support for women who factor into the statistics.

In March, Haywood-Cory woke up one morning to textbook heart attack symptoms.

“It was out of the blue really,” she said.

She had recently started training for a triathlon was far from the traditional image of a woman at risk of heart disease.

She was rushed to the emergency room where medical personnel drew blood, took a chest X-ray, did an EKG, and gave her an aspirin as well as a nitroglycerin patch.

“The doctors kept saying they did not think I had a heart attack. I was the wrong age, wrong gender, didn’t have a family history, and had negative results on the initial tests,” Haywood-Cory said.

Then the second round of blood work came back with elevated cardiac enzymes; she had had a heart attack.

“I’d had a small tear in my right coronary artery,” said Haywood-Cory.

Six stents were put in to repair the tear and she was referred to a 12-week cardiac rehab program.

She was told that SCAD is an extremely rare disease and she was very fortunate to have survived. “I was told that 70 percent of SCADs was discovered in autopsy,” Haywood-Cory said.

“Trying to look on the bright side of things, I went home and did some online searching about SCADs,” Haywood-Cory said. She came across WomenHeart’s online support group where she connected with many women who had SCADs, survived and were thriving.

Haywood-Cory said that she met a woman from New Zealand who had SCADs.

After talking with her, Haywood-Cory was relieved because the woman was five years out from learning she had SCADs and was thriving. Being able to connect with numerous women through WomenHeart who knew what she was going through made the experience less lonely.

Haywood-Cory will be wearing red on Friday.

“It’s a chance for me to ... advocate to the 41 million women living in the U.S who are at risk for developing heart disease; to educate people that heart disease is the number one killer in women,” she said.