*As we close out February, which is American Heart Month, we want to remind you of some benefits of heart health and a healthy diet to minimize the risk of cardiovascular disease.
This month celebrates the 19th anniversary of the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women® Movement which is nationally sponsored by CVS Health. This year, the American Heart Association is honoring a new class of “Real Women” – heart disease and stroke survivors who share their moving stories to educate, empower and inspire other women.
We caught up with one of these amazing women, Shemellar Davis, 46, of Katy, TX to speak about her diagnosis of hypertension and postpartum cardiomyopathy just after giving birth to her second son at 29 years old. Now she’s speaking out about her experience and how she is committed to improving her heart health.
“Hypertension. It starts in the early 20s for African American women. So if they learn early how to take care of themselves, then they won’t end up in situations to where they might have some kind of heart condition,” Davis said in our exclusive conversation. The rest of the interview below has been condensed and edited.
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Tell us about your heart health journey and why you were selected for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women Movement.
About three weeks after I gave birth to my son, my mother died from congestive heart failure. My mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure at the age of 48 and she died at 52 when she died from congestive heart failure. We were all shocked because we knew that she had a heart condition, but congestive heart failure didn’t mean anything to me as far as ohh, she could possibly die. This is a very serious disease because we didn’t know me or my siblings. We didn’t know how serious it was.
So when my mom died from congestive heart failure, I started researching and I was like, this is very similar to what the doctors diagnosed me with. I had postpartum cardiomyopathy, cardiomyopathy means heart failure and I didn’t know that until I did my research. Even after going to the doctor’s office several times before my mom passed away, heart failure never crossed my mind. So after that I was afraid and I was like, I have to change the way I eat. I have to change the way I live. I have to change my life completely because at that time my life was dedicated to my children and my husband.
I didn’t really think about myself, so that was one of the reasons why I wanted to get the word out about heart failure. Because it’s sneaky. I didn’t know that I had undiagnosed hypertension, and that’s what caused the heart failure. 58% of Black women have hypertension.
And a lot of that hypertension can happen during pregnancy, which does cause heart problems later on in life. So being honored by the American Heart Association and being picked, I wanna get the word out because if you look at me, I’m slim and I’m tall. You will not think that I had a heart condition. I take medication twice a day to control my hypertension. Even though I eat well. I’m a vegetarian. I exercise, I drink water all day. But that blood pressure is out of control if I don’t take my medication.
You’re a 5th-grader teacher, so you have to take extra precautions not to let that environment trigger any stressors.
When I first became an educator, I actually used to do yoga. My sister found this app where you can do yoga, and I haven’t done yoga in a while. But yoga does help because it is stressful. Being an educator, especially nowadays because things are so different. It’s so different from when I was in the 5th grade. The kinds of things that we have to instruct and the way that you relate to the kids and things. You can do things you can’t do. So I have to maintain my stress levels within a very stressful environment, yeah.
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What advice do you have for people, Black women especially, who may not be concerned about heart health?
What I would tell you is when you go to the doctor, ask questions because I can think of going to the doctor before I was diagnosed, I never asked questions about my blood pressure. Never. If you think that you might have hypertension or high blood pressure, ask questions about it. Be your own advocate for yourself. Because if you’re not an advocate for yourself, the doctors are not advocates for you.
No one ever explain my condition to me until I start asking questions. I didn’t know it was related to what my mom had, so that’s my main thing is to make sure that you’re being an advocate for your health. Just because you look a certain way. It does not mean that you’re healthy. So ask questions about your blood pressure. Ask if you can have an EKG, because I think an EKG is part of regular wellness care for women because sometimes the EKG will give you information about your heart, and sometimes it will not. But that blood pressure is a key component to making sure that your heart is healthy, as well as taking care of your diet.
You can make little changes in your diet, eating more fruit and more vegetables and cutting out a little bit of those carbs, and watching how much salt you sprinkle on your food because that is a component.
Hypertension is what caused my heart failure. But it is not an automatic diagnosis for having some kind of heart condition with hypertension. It actually can be controlled with medication and your diet as well. But just because you have hypertension does not mean you have a heart condition.
What happened to me is my hypertension was undiagnosed and out of control. So it caused trauma to my heart over a long time period. They actually don’t even know how long I had undiagnosed hypertension because I had no symptoms at all, no symptoms. So if you do let your hypertension get out of control, it can definitely cause heart problems.
I take my medication on time and I take care of myself. So just because you have hypertension, that does not mean that you’re going to have some kind of heart condition. And I’m not a doctor, but that’s something that I’ve learned on the way researching because I care about my health and I care about the health of women like me.
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What types of resources are available for women via the Go Red for Women® Movement?
I found Go Red for Women on Facebook. Then I found them on Instagram. They’re on social media and you can follow them and see the events that are going on, and other women that are like you and the questions that they ask. They also have a group called Go Red, Get Fit. That’s how I ended up getting chosen to be a 2023 Real Woman because I was in that group and we would talk about our health.
Because when you hear other people’s stories, it makes you feel empowered. Like, if she can do it, I can do it. And what really made me feel empowered is that I don’t want to be a statistic like my mom was.
The ladies that I’m with, the 2023 Real Women, we’re like sisters. We’re in this tech group together, and that’s what we do. We bounce ideas off each other. We tell each other when we’re not feeling so well. And these women inspire me. They say all these wonderful things. Some of the things they say to me makes me sit up straight and makes me wanna move forward and do better and help other people feel the way I feel.
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