Soap Opera legend Susan Lucci underwent emergency heart surgery in October for a major blockage in her arteries that could have ended in a fatal heart attack.

She admitted in People magazine that she ignored the warning signs for three months.

Sometime last autumn, she had felt a tightness in her chest but “told myself, it’s nothing, it will go away. And it did.” Roughly 10 days later, the pain returned, “radiating around my rib cage. I thought maybe I had fastened my bra too tightly.”

Then on October 23, while at the Tory Burch boutique at the Americana Manhasset shopping center, the pain came back, intensified. “It felt like an elephant pressing down on my chest,” she told the magazine, adding that the store manager offered to drive her to Roslyn’s St. Francis Hospital, which specializes in cardiology. 

The tests revealed that the actress had 90 percent blockage in the heart’s main artery, which doctors call “the widow maker,” and 70 percent blockage in another branch.

“Ninety percent blockage – I was shocked,” Lucci said.

The 72-year-old actress had to undergo surgery, during which her doctor inserted two stents into her arteries to help increase blood flow back to her heart.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among women today, killing approximately 400,000 women a year, according to the latest statistics from the American Heart Association.

Susan Lucci who has devoted decades to a daily Pilates workout and a heart healthy Mediterranean diet, was unaware that her father’s heart disease meant she was also at risk. Her father, Victor Lucci, had suffered a heart attack in his late forties.  “I always thought I had my mother’s genes,” says Lucci of her mother, Jeanette, now 101 years old.

Diabetes is a powerful risk factor for heart disease in women as reported on the American Diabetes Association’s website. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women with diabetes. Women with diabetes are 2 times as likely to have a second heart attack and 4 times more likely to have heart failure than women without diabetes.

Many women with type 2 diabetes already have heart disease when they are diagnosed or have many of the risk factors such as high lipids levels, high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, and abnormalities in blood vessel function.

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