In 2019 at the age of 36, Huie made the decision to return to competitive soccer after more than a decade of retirement, joining the LA Galaxy OC as a midfielder. “I was playing with really young, fresh-out-of-college 20-year-olds, but I was doing really well and I loved it,” she says. Playing on the team added considerably to her already busy schedule. As the mother of five young girls, Huie had recently started working as a soccer coach for a number of youth teams, including ones her daughters played for. “It was a really hectic time,” she says, “but my family was a huge part of my career, which is why I came back to the game.” Then, that fall, after her season with the LA Galaxy was over, everything changed. One September day, after walking up a hill to a practice field to coach one of her teams, Huie felt an intense burning sensation in her chest. “I was having a conversation with a friend and all of a sudden I felt really out of it,” Huie remembers. “She’s talking, but I’m not really understanding or paying attention to what she’s saying. I notice I’m sweating profusely and am having a much more difficult time than I normally would getting air in as we’re going up this hill.” Huie sat down, and then lay down, to see if the pain would ease. It didn’t. “You know when you tear a piece of paper in half? That’s exactly what it felt like in the middle of my chest,” she says. “It felt like fire. It was burning. And now I can’t breathe, and I’m sweating even more.” Despite the intensity of the pain, Huie believed she was just having heartburn. “It never even occurred to me that I could be having a heart attack at that moment,” she now recalls. She also “didn’t want to make a big deal out of nothing” — a common response among women in such circumstances. “That’s what we busy moms do,” she says. “We don’t want to deal with it right this minute because we have kids who need something else.” RELATED: Many Women, and Their Doctors, Don’t Recognize Female Heart Attack Symptoms At the hospital, doctors told her that she was suffering from spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD, a rare condition characterized by a tear in an artery wall of the heart, which can slow or block blood flow. Patients are typically female who are otherwise healthy, with few or no risk factors, according to the AHA. “We are just beginning to learn about the causes of SCAD,” says Santhi Ganesh, MD, a cardiologist at the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center in Ann Arbor. “Currently our understanding is that there is an underlying susceptibility to SCAD, and then a trigger that incites the SCAD.” Genetics, as well as certain underlying arterial diseases, such as fibromuscular dysplasia, may increase the risk of SCAD, says Dr. Ganesh, who was not involved in Huie’s care. “The triggers seem to often include emotional or physical stress, or may involve hormonal and other changes such as those that occur in the time after a woman delivers a baby, but in many cases are unknown,” she continues. For Huie, the news was a tremendous shock. “In my head, I’m thinking I do not fit the criteria for a heart attack,” she says. “I’m young. I’m fit. I’m healthy. I eat clean. I don’t smoke. I am the epitome of being fit, so none of this made sense.” Eventually, after her doctors got a full picture of her lifestyle, they told her they believed stress played a big role. “One of the things I do know that contributed to my particular situation was having such extreme stress and going into an extreme sport,” Huie says. “That was one of the main things that doctors were able to pinpoint.”
‘I Feel Like 90 Percent of My Regular Self’
After a few days in the hospital, Huie was able to go home, and she spent the next few months on a treatment regimen of blood thinners and blood pressure medication. Her doctors told her to monitor her symptoms and warned her if she felt pain similar to what she experienced that day on the hill, she would need to come back to the emergency room immediately. “That was really scary,” she says. “I wanted to go home, back to my regular life, but they were telling me it could happen again.” Ganesh says the question of predicting SCAD recurrence after an initial event is a big focus of the field and ongoing research. “A minority of patients have recurrence, around 5 to 10 percent in the hospital, and overall the recurrence risk over three to four years after an initial SCAD may be approximately 15 to 20 percent,” she says. “Certain medications may have a benefit, such as aspirin and beta-blockers, but these recommendations are not backed by prospective clinical trials at this point.” While Huie had a couple of scares that brought her back to the ER, she has not experienced a recurrence. Her condition means she can no longer play competitive soccer, but her role as a coach to youth teams keeps her close to the sport. “I feel like 90 percent of my regular self,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever be at 100 percent again, but 90 is good. I have to really pace myself throughout the day, since I’m so used to being on the go. If I don’t, I burn out by two o’clock in the afternoon and I’m useless after that.” She’s sharing her story as part of the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women “Real Women” campaign to spread awareness of heart disease in women. “We really don’t talk enough about how heart disease is the number one killer of women,” she says. “It’s a message that needs to be heard over and over again. I think if we spoke about it more frequently and got it into people’s subconscious minds, it would have gotten into mine that day and I would have just called an ambulance to take me to the hospital right away.” She also says the experience has led to many conversations with her daughters to empower them with knowledge about her health and theirs. “From the day they came home and saw me [after the heart attack], the first thing I thought to do was to educate them so they’re not fearful,” she says. “Because when you don’t know things you run based on fear. I wanted to give them the space to be scared, because it certainly was a traumatic situation, but I wanted them to know it wasn’t anything that we as a family did wrong.” RELATED: Heart Health Awareness Month, February 2021 Huie says it was a good opportunity for her to talk to her daughters about stressors and the importance of self-care as well. “When you’re a mom, you’re going to have stress,” she says. “But I’ve learned to compartmentalize everything. If I feel tired, I tune in to that and respect that and maybe spend more time in meditation in the morning. I also tune in to all the stressors that are coming, knowing I won’t be able to take five on at a time and I’ll just have to pick the most important ones to focus on.”
