Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Cindy Marten, Mother Go Red for Women | UC San Diego Health 2020

I exercised all my life and I swam and I bicycle with a group up until about a

year before I had the heart attack. I was having trouble breathing and trouble

getting up the hills and keeping up with the group that I was riding with.

I couldn't imagine what was going on and the next morning I just could not

get up. I had these terrible pains in my chest and trouble breathing.

That's when my daughter Cindy came looking for me because I didn't answer

my phone I was on the couch without my phone. I don't want to think about what

it would have happened if I hadn't shown up at that moment so i called 9-1-1

thankfully the paramedics got there very quickly and diagnosed that she was

having a heart attack. This was to me out of the blue to her

not so much heart disease does run in her family. We got in the ambulance and

she got to the hospital they were able to diagnose this heart attack and turned

out that she needed stents in her heart she did not need open-heart surgery or a

bypass. I was prepared for the worst because of everything had been through

with my husband's heart issues but they were able to very quickly get in with

the intervention. I have had the pleasure of taking care of Fern since she came in here in January 2018.

She presented feeling dizzy and lightheaded and had a seven second pause

meaning her heart stopped for seven seconds. So at that time we implanted

them a leadless pacemaker which is a very new technology available to

patients that we are using here at UCSD very successfully. I'm very pleased

to see that Fern is doing so well. At the time that we were waiting for the

pacemaker to be installed was when I had just agreed to become the chair of the

Go Red For Women campaign with the American Heart Association. The

event to light up in hospital red was happening and I was already planning to

be at the event and just the irony of it was my mother was literally in the ICU

of the hospital that we were lighting red

at that moment waiting to get her pacemaker. She had just experienced

the pause in her heart we weren't sure where things were gonna go if she was

gonna have another pause but I knew when we lit that building red my mom was in

that hospital in good hands with the best doctors and nurses and care team

that the world has to offer. UC San Diego Health Cardiovascular Institute is

the sponsor of the Go Red For Women campaign in San Diego so it's really

appropriate for us to kick off the month of Heart month of February to light our

building red first. Obviously, it's important that we treat our patients

with heart health but as a hospital we have an obligation to the community as

well to help educate them about women's heart disease. So lighting the

building red really kind of helps draw attention to the mission and to the

message of the Go Red For Women campaign. I think that the Go Red For Women is

such an important initiative. I was thinking about why is it important to me

to Go Red? I Go Red for my mother. I Go Red for my sister. I Go Red for my

daughter. I Go Red for my patients. and I Go Red for UCSD because we need to

partner with the organizations like this to reach out in the community and take

care of all our patients. I see the patients I see how sick they are I see

the people that are waiting for heart transplants who just had heart

transplants patients on ECMO people that we fly in on the helicopter or so sick

from outlying communities - That's why I Go Red, not only for for my family,

but also for our patients and for our staff, too. Because they're so invested in

caring for people's heart health and they do such an amazing job every day of

taking care of our patients. That's really inspiring for me. I think that the

information that we're given through the Heart Association and through the

hospital I think is helpful to keep us healthy

and keep us going especially after you have a heart attack. I'm very proud to

say that Cindy's my daughter we have a very special relationship.

I think that the fact she's taken on this chairmanship I'm very proud that

she decided to do that because it's a topic subject that's very important to

both her and to me. I just love this event because we can spread the message

to the whole city as we kickoff heart health month in February. Let's light

this whole city red. We're going to start with this building today and we're gonna

light up the city and we're gonna help teach everybody the importance of heart

health and I'm so proud to be part of this Go Red movement.