Rosie O’Donnell is detailing a “massive” heart attack she suffered about a decade ago. According to the former View co-host — who was “really, really lucky” to catch it in time — she “should’ve died” from the medical emergency.
While speaking on the latest episode of Raven-Symoné and wife Miranda Pearman-Maday’s The Best Podcast Ever podcast, O’Donnell revealed that she was 50 years old when she was “rushed to the ER” for a heart attack.
It all started when she was picking up her friend from a chemo treatment at a New York hospital. When a stranger in the parking lot asked for assistance, she decided to help.
“She said, ‘Rosie, will you help me up?’ So I went over and I helped her up and it took a lot longer than I expected,” she recalled. “I got home and my arms were hurting. I thought, ‘That’s funny, it must’ve been from pushing her up.’ So I went about my business.”
She continued, “I was in my little art studio and my son, who was only young at the time, said to me, ‘Mommy you look like a ghost.'”
O’Donnell then googled signs of a heart attack for women — and while she had “a few of them,” she didn’t “really sound the alarms yet.”
“The truth of the matter is, I had this heart attack on a Monday at 10 in the morning. I went to therapy at 2 p.m. and I said to my therapist, ‘Do you think I could be having a heart attack?’ And she said, ‘You know, you always do this. You semanticize your feelings,'” she explained. “I get home, I can hardly walk upstairs. I take two baby aspirin, I go to sleep, I wake up and my family goes, ‘You have to go to the doctor.'”
Two days after the heart attack, the actress finally decided to see a cardiologist — who discovered that she had a “massive heart attack” and immediately sent her to the emergency room.
“I was like, ‘Wait, wait, what?!’ I couldn’t believe it,” O’Donnell said. “And then I came to find out that the symptoms for a woman having a heart attack are very different than the symptoms for men having heart attacks. Yet what we see on TV are always men having heart attacks even though more women die of heart attacks every year than men.”
As it turned out, the Flintstones star had a “100% blockage of her LAD” — or left anterior descending artery — which is infamously known as a “widowmaker.” After having an operation to put in stent it, O’Donnell — who later did an HBO special about the signs of women’s heart attacks — changed her relationship with her body.
“It brought me into my body and to be in touch with my body in a way that I never had been since I was a very young girl,” she said. “It made me aware of feelings. I can kind of dissociate and do the world from my head and just try to use my intellect and not really pay much attention to my body, but this forced me to pay attention.”
Moreover, O’Donnell joked that the medical scare wasn’t enough to make fans forget about her role in the iconic 1992 sports comedy, A League of Their Own — even as she was heading in for an emergency operation.
“One nurse said to me, ‘Do you think Dottie (Geena Davis) dropped that ball on purpose?'” she remembered. “I’m like, ‘I’m going in for heart surgery. Don’t ask me about A League of Their Own!’“