Soap opera beauty Susan Lucci just had the health scare of a lifetime! The All My Children star revealed she recently underwent an emergency heart procedure after feeling tightness in her chest on multiple occasions.
“I told myself, it’s nothing, it will go away,” she shared with People of the first incident last fall. “And it did.” Ten days later, the pain came back. “[It was] radiating around my rib cage,” Lucci confessed. “I thought maybe I had fastened my bra too tightly.”
Soon after that, while out and about shopping, the brunette bombshell experienced the same feeling again. “It felt like an elephant pressing down on my chest,” she exclaimed.
Lucci was subsequently rushed to St. Francis Hospital on Long Island where a CT scan revealed a 90 percent blockage in her heart’s main artery and a 70 percent blockage in another branch.
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“Ninety percent blockage — I was shocked,” she shared, adding that two stents were inserted into her arteries. “I’m lucky to be alive.”
Her cardiologist, Holly Andersen, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical Center echoed Lucci’s claim. “Had she gone home, that 90 percent blockage could have become 100 percent and she could have suffered a significant heart attack or even sudden death,” she said.
Now that Lucci is feeling better, we imagine she’ll be getting back to her impressive health routine. “I get up about a half hour early every morning,” she told Closer Weekly in a previous interview. “I wake up and have a cup of coffee and I go right into my Pilates Pro Chair before I even know what hit me!”
“I eat a Mediterranean kind of a diet. Mostly very clean. A lot of superfoods,” she added. If anyone had told me I’d actually choose to have fruit instead of a cheeseburger or ice cream sundae, I never would have believed it.”
And when it comes to the ageless TV mogul, it seems we won’t be seeing less of her anytime soon. She told Closer, “[Retirement] is not a word in my vocabulary or my radar!”
