Story by Xiaojia Cai
There is only one day left before this year’s Heart Week comes to a close. Every May, Australians are reminded through Heart Week to pay closer attention to their heart health. Yet many people still believe heart disease happens to someone else — especially those with unhealthy lifestyles or obvious risk factors or family history.
Rachel Jayne Cassidy once believed that too.
As a busy author, she had maintained a healthy lifestyle for years. She did not smoke or drink alcohol. She was slim, exercised regularly, and had no known family history of heart disease. The day began no differently from any other ordinary day. As she wrote in her book: “The day started out like any other — just another ordinary day.”
At six o’clock that morning, the alarm rang as usual. She got up, exercised, showered, and felt energetic as always. Recalling her condition at the time, she wrote:
“I was slim and fit. I walked around five kilometers almost every day, and with great enthusiasm I embraced Pilates classes.” No one could have imagined that only hours later, she would collapse onto the floor during a critical heart attack, coming close to death. At the time, her life had been under considerable pressure. Only weeks before the heart attack, her home had been violently broken into. Precious belongings and unfinished manuscripts were stolen. Even her little poodle Chloe was traumatised by the robbers. Police warned her that the intruders could potentially return.
On the very day of her heart attack, she had also conducted a long interview involving traumatic stories and difficult social issues. As a writer who had long focused on vulnerable communities and people on the margins of society, she had grown use to carrying the emotions and suffering of others. She wrote: “I felt enormous empathy for the suffering of others.”
After the interview, she began experiencing pain around her shoulder blades, numbness in her fingers, dizziness, and nausea. But like many people, she did not immediately recognise the seriousness of what was happening. She kept trying to find “reasonable explanations” for her symptoms: “Although I had textbook symptoms, my mind wasn’t processing what was occurring in my body.”
She thought the shoulder pain came from sitting too long. She thought the dizziness was caused by skipping lunch. She believed it was simply emotional exhaustion. That was until her body began losing control completely.
After returning home, her heart attack escalated she felt she was losing consciousness. She tried to answer a phone call but barely had the strength to press the screen. Fortunately, her son found her in time and rushed her to hospital. She later realised that if help had come any later, she may not have survived.
During a phone conversation, she told me: “Clara, I almost died. Almost.”
Hospital examinations confirmed she was experiencing a heart attack. Only hours earlier, she had been a woman who appeared completely healthy. Now she was lying in a hospital bed surrounded by medical equipment, uncertain whether she would survive the next thirty days. Doctors warned her that she still had a one in 250 chance of passing away within the first 30 days after the heart attack.
What ultimately changed her perspective on heart health was not only the heart attack itself, but what she came to realise during recovery — women with heart disease have long been underrepresented, overlooked, and misunderstood. At the rehabilitation centre, she noticed that the overwhelming majority of patients were men, while female patients were not attending in the same numbers. Many women returned home almost immediately after their heart event to care for their families after leaving hospital, often neglecting their own recovery and increasing the risk of recurrence. She began to realise how limited public understanding of women’s heart disease symptoms truly was.
Many people assume heart attacks always involve severe chest pain. Yet women’s symptoms are often more complex and easier to dismiss. Fatigue, nausea, shoulder, jaw, and back pain, shortness of breath, and numbness in the arms can all be warning signs.
Rachel Jayne herself was precisely the kind of person who seemed least likely to suffer a heart attack. Her own heart attack and not being able to locate a book like In a Heartbeat was the catalyst behind her writing the book. After surviving her own critical heart event, she realised that books about heart health also needed
something beyond medical terminology and statistics: the voices of real survivors and guidance from medical experts. As she said: “After surviving my own critical heart event I knew the importance of being able to read a book about heart health that includes real life survivor’s stories and insightful guidance from leading
medical experts.”
As a result, In a Heartbeat does not present itself as a traditional medical text. Instead, it feels more like a collective echo of survival and life itself. Alongside valuable insights from doctors and specialists, the book also documents deeply personal experiences from patients and families affected by heart disease: one man rebuilt his entire lifestyle after a heart attack nearly caused him to miss his daughter’s wedding; another found himself moved to tears simply hearing that someone else had fallen ill after enduring physical suffering himself — all of this vulnerability and fear eventually transforms into a form of genuine heroism — the determination and passion to keep living. The stories are raw and real and incredibly inspiring and uplifting.
In this book, life and death are not opposites. Vulnerability and strength are not opposites either. Everything can exist within the same person at once. For that reason, In a Heartbeat is perhaps not truly about avoiding death, but about how people begin to understand life itself once they become more aware of its fragility.
As Rachel Jayne said: “I was constantly surprised by the contributors in the book that had survived major heart events. I was inspired by their tenacity, courage and determination against all odds to make it through and not just survive but thrive.”
And Rachel Jayne herself, even after standing at the edge of death, continues to maintain an almost relentless dedication to writing. She writes every day while simultaneously working on multiple books. She told me: “I write every day 7 days a week I love writing my passion it comes very naturally for me.”
After surviving that heart event, writing no longer seemed to be simply a profession or passion for her. It became a way of reconnecting with the world. She hopes the book will leave readers with more than knowledge, encouraging people to rethink the importance of their own health: “I hope readers of all ages will rethink the importance of their own heart health and the heart health of those they love.”
And perhaps that is what the Heart Foundations Heart Week is truly trying to remind people of on its final day: Heart disease does not always happen to “someone else.”
So we must all remember to never miss a beat.
