A new chance at life with a happy heart

SALT LAKE CITY — First it happened to her father. Now it was her turn.

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” Lisa Stocking told her mother and sister one week before Christmas in 2010. Her chest felt tight with a heavy, unrelenting pressure and she could barely breathe.

Is this what it felt like to die?

“It was the worst pain I’d ever felt,” says Stocking, 49, “but I don’t remember a whole lot after that. All I know is, it was the day that changed my life.”

Thirteen months later, Stocking walks briskly into Salt Lake City’s Market Street Grill, slender and confident with a purposeful stride. She doesn’t look like a woman who shouldn’t be here, but she knows the odds weren’t in her favor on the night her sister, Karen, rushed her to Riverton Hospital.

Stocking collapsed in the emergency room and went into full cardiac arrest shortly after she was led through the hospital door. It was a scene similar to the one her father, Richard, had experienced 23 years earlier when he suffered a heart attack and died at age 52.

“He was a fun man to be around, always ready with a good sense of humor, always hardworking,” recalls Stocking, who was 24 then. “I miss him a lot. My biggest fear is having my family go through that same feeling of loss with me.”

With the realization that she’s fortunate to see another year, Stocking, who was wearing a red shirt covered with rhinestone hearts, wanted to sit down over a heart-healthy Free Lunch of salmon and salad during National Heart Month in the hope of inspiring the rest of us to make a few lifestyle changes and extend our lives. She urges everyone not to put off having a conversation with a doctor about whether they’re at risk for heart disease.

It’s a simple task that might have kept Stocking from waking up in the intensive care unit.

“For years, I was overweight, eating fast food all the time and not thinking much about it,” she says. “I’d been going in for regular checkups, but my doctors never told me that I was a ticking time bomb. I was later told that my cholesterol wasn’t high enough to set off an alarm, even with my family history. If I’d insisted on asking more questions, maybe I wouldn’t have had to spend that Christmas recovering from a heart attack.”