When I turned 30, due to my father's heart history and my family genetics, I vowed to start seeing a cardiologist every year and just really be proactive and take my own heart health into my own hands.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn't as hunky-dory like it was.
My parents wanted me to be a doctor. So I took up science, but then realised that my heart was not in it at all. The thought of treating ailing people was very depressing.
The importance of heart health became very real for me when my father died of heart disease seven years ago. Having experienced the loss first hand, I am inspired to do everything I can to break the cycle and prevent families from losing loved ones to this preventable disease.
I am a doctor. I have long experience with heart disease.
I've been extraordinarily fortunate that I've been able to go live a very active, stressful life. And I don't believe that my heart disease changed me for the worst.
This is going to sound really sad, but I didn't really have any heartthrobs when I was growing up. I was a bit of a geek.
I was involved in music, acting, and some running, but my firm wish was to become a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.
I saw many people who had advanced heart disease and I was so frustrated because I knew if they just knew how to do the right thing, simple lifestyle and diet steps, that the entire trajectory of their life and health would have been different.
As a heart surgeon I am on constant call, and when not researching or giving lectures, I like to be with my family.
I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.