30-year-old dancer opens up about heart attack to raise awareness for other women

She thought chest pressure meant she had to burp

A 30-year-old professional dancer has described her experience having a heart attack to raise awareness about symptoms that may otherwise be ignored. 

Megan Corbin, from Crescent City, California, suffered a “major” heart attack on 10 July 2020. 

According to Corbin, the morning of the heart attack, she had woken up with a “really heavy pain” in her chest, which had been getting increasingly worse as the days went by.

However, the 30-year-old, who is now a volunteer for the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women "Real Women" campaign, said that, at the time, she dismissed the pain as acid reflux or the need to burp.

“I felt like if I drank a ginger ale, I could burp up whatever it was,” she told the AHA.

In a clip shared on the campaign website, Corbin recalled how her pain had continued to increase, and that she began to experience cold sweats and numbness in her left arm and in half of her right arm.

According to the AHA, the symptoms of a heart attack in women can be different than symptoms experienced by men, with the health organisation noting that women can experience symptoms such as chest pain, pain or pressure in the lower chest or upper abdomen, jaw, neck or upper back pain, nausea or vomiting, shortness of breath, fainting, indigestion and extreme fatigue. 

At the urging of her husband, Corbin said she eventually agreed to go to the hospital, where the doctors in the emergency room told her “it looks like you’re having a heart attack”.

“They were extremely thrown off by the situation and my age,” Corbin recalled. “They were like: ‘How are you 30 years old and having a heart attack?’”

After the hospital had her flown from Crescent City, California to a hospital in Medford, Oregon, which was better equipped “to deal with heart issues,” Corbin said she underwent surgery so that the doctors could place a stent in her heart, a common procedure that sees a tiny mesh tube placed into a clogged artery to allow blood to flow more freely, according to the AHA.

“I still had no idea. I would never, in a million years, have thought that I was having a heart attack,” she recalled. “And it’s because I am healthy, I am active, I eat right, I do everything right.

“And I still had a heart attack.”

According to Corbin, she learned after her heart attack that she had high cholesterol and elevated blood pressure.

Since recovering, through long walks and dancing, Corbin has dedicated her efforts to spreading awareness about heart disease and helping people make informed choices about “what they’re putting in their bodies,” with plans to start a blog about her experience in the future.

“I want to spread awareness and hopefully prevent this from happening to the next person,” she said.

According to the AHA, heart disease and stroke cause “one in three deaths among women each year – more than all cancers combined,” noting that this can be changed because 80 per cent of “cardiac and stroke events may be prevented with education and action”.