There’s a good reason that more people were wearing the color red on Friday. It was Go Red for Women Day, a time to draw awareness to heart disease in women.

Thanks to Go Red for Women, more people know that a third of women die of heart disease–the number one killer of women. But to turn that around, we need to know more and do more about potential heart problems.

Heidi Keller comes to UPMC Altoona for a checkup every six months. A few years ago she began feeling pressure in her neck. That was her only issue, but as a surgical tech at the hospital, she ran into Kristi Montrella, an acute care nurse practitioner in the hospital’s Heart and Vascular Institute. Montrella advised her to get the symptom checked.

“Typically, when we think of heart problems, we think of a typical clutching your chest, heart pain, but women can have different kinds of symptoms,” Montrella explains.

Those symptoms include chest or neck pressure, like Heidi’s, jaw or neck pain, and nausea or vomiting.

A heart catheterization by Cardiologist Dr. George Jabbour, showed that Heidi had a heart dissection–a rare heart problem.

Heidi remembers, “When Dr. Jabbour said I was going to have open heart surgery, I looked at him and said, ‘are you kidding me,’ yeah I was scared, very scared.”

She was only 50 at the time. Since then, she’s had two open heart surgeries and had a pacemaker installed.

Montrella says, “We see women having heart attacks at 30, at 40. A lot of that kind comes from familial, meaning genetics, high cholesterol, and a lot of it can be from smoking.”

But Heidi didn’t have any of those risk factors, an important message to women who think they’re immune to heart problems.

“We need to know our symptoms, we need to know our bodies, and we need to know when to speak up,” Montrella says.

She adds that we also need to know our numbers like blood pressure and cholesterol, we need to exercise, and to eat healthy foods.

Kristi Montrella is well known for her advocacy for women’s heart issues. She was the recipient of the 2019 Blair County Go Red for Women Healthcare Professional Award,