Songbird Lalah Hathaway Takes Flight
By Joy Sewing
Lalah Hathway feels like a woman-child.
rich brand of soul, Hathaway is now stepping into a new, grown-up role.
Saint James as a national ambassador for Susan G. Komen’s Circle of
Promise, a campaign to help prevent breast cancer in African-American
women and provide a support network within the community.
service as she does to her music. She’ll perform at the Divas Against
Disparities Benefit Concert at Heart & Soul’s Sisters Partnering
All-Together (SPA) Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, October 16 to
19, and will continue talking with women across the country about the
importance of early detection and treatment as she tours to promote her
latest CD, “Self Portrait.”
39, says. “I’m happy to be able to have this platform to talk with
women and just open the dialogue. I’m able to stand in front of
thousands o
f people and share information. That’s powerful.”
manager, Patricia Shields, is a three-year breast cancer survivor and
many of her friends have had issues with their breasts. “Breast cancer
isn’t anything we ever talked about in my household growing up,” she
says. “I know many women who live with that false sense of security.
They didn’t have it and their mothers didn’t have it, so they believe
it will skip them. But that’s not necessarily true.”
her own health. She recently had her first mammogram at Meharry Medical
Center in Nashville and has become more diligent about doing routine
self-breast examinations. (Hathaway’s right on schedule. Women should
have annual mammograms starting at age 40. If there’s a family history
of breast cancer, those mammograms should start at age 30.) She also is
making more of an effort to exercise. Her favorites are Nintendo’s
WiiFit, a video game that combines fitness and entertainment, and
spinning.
legend Donny Hathaway and her classically trained vocalist mother,
Eulaulah Hathaway. Her father committed suicide when she was just 10.
ston and debuted her first record in 1990 at age 21 while still in
college. She toured with jazz pianist Joe Sample and went on to perform
with Marcus Miller, Meshell Ndegéocello and Mary J. Blige. Her sister,
Kenya Hathaway, has toured with George Benson as a singer, guitarist
and percussionist and, most recently, worked on “American Idol.”
collaboration with white-hot singer-songwriter Rahsaan Patterson. She
says her father’s presence provided inspiration for the introspective
disc, but especially for the single “Little Girl.” “This feels
different and fresh,” Hathaway says of her latest effort. “The kind of
response I’m getting feels equal to what I’ve put into it. That’s a
good feeling. Hopefully, I’ll be able to play off this record for a
very long time. The most important thing to me is to be able to get out
live and play the music.”
eventually to release a live album, explaining live music is a “dying
art. Soul music is really meant to be experienced with all the drums
and singing you can’t hear on the radio,” she says. “I grew up
listening to the radio a lot and recognized all of that music shaped me
as a person. Soul music tells the story of our people in this country,
and it
s really important they hear the story, so it can be passed down.”
number of fans more quickly, but there are still challenges with
traditional radio. “If you turn on the radio right now, you hear the
same 10 songs. And if you want black soul music, you are relegated to a
hip-hop station or an oldies station. You either fit in one box or the
other. There is a whole gang of artists who feel disenfranchised by
radio.”
there’s still that side of me that is online at midnight waiting for
the new GameStop Mario [video game] to come out,” she says. “I think
I’ll always be that way.”
Fitness Guru Overcomes Two Heart Attacks
Knowledge helped her find her way back.
You could say I was a workout junkie, addicted to the adrenaline surge I got during a hard workout. My jones led me to hike t he steep and rocky Great Wall of China, mountain bike the switchbacks along Texas’ Fossil Ridge, make the slippery pre-dawn hike to the top of Blue Mountain and soar 25 feet high on a trapeze. That said, you might guess that it would take some kind of calamity to make me afraid to jog a slow mile or hop on my bike and take a spin around my hilly neighborhood.
It happened in May 2003,after the first leg of a 26.2-mile fundraiser walk for breast cancer. At first, I felt fine, but at 3:30 a.m. I awoke with my jaws clenched and a heavy cramp in my chest. I felt nauseated and scared. I knew what was happening, but it would take more than a year for me to fully understand and accept that I was having a heart attack at 36. In a tent. In the middle of a fundraiser walk.
A week after the walk, stress test and electrocardiogram results said I was fine, despite the hot daggers I felt in my chest when I ran on the hospital’s treadmill. So that day I was admitted and had a balloon angioplasty and three stents put in to prop open my narrowed left coronary artery.
I was dumbfounded. I thought that all of this time I was trading exercise and a fairly healthy lifestyle for immunity from health problems like cancer and heart disease. I’ve been a fitness instructor for 10 years and a fitness editor for seven, so I preached the gospel of the preventive powers of exercise. Some part of me felt duped and robbed.
I wasn’t anything close to a perfect health disciple. I was carrying about 20 extra pounds, but I had no other red-flag risk factors. My good cholesterol was nearly three times as high as doctors recommend, but my blood work revealed high levels of a type of bad cholesterol that is genetic and probably will never budge, despite exercise or drugs. That, plus the year-long stress of moving to a new city for a new job, was probably what tipped the health balance that had been teetering for some time.
The recovery from surgery was quick, and in a few weeks I started cardiac rehabilitation to help me ease back into the habit. Cardiac rehabilitation helped me find my low gear, but I still wanted to sweat hard like I had before. In rehab, I had a hard time staying positive, wired to a monitor like the Six Million Dollar Man, barely breaking a sweat as I walked slowly on a treadmill alongside folks who had much more severe heart problems. Square one was time zones away from where I wanted to be. But in three months I finished rehab and gradually started moderate workouts.
Then, it happened again. Six months after the first heart attack, the evening after a 30-minute easy run, I drove myself to the hospital with chest pains. The blockage was the right coronary artery, which had shown no signs of blockage six months earlier.
BACK TO SQUARE ONE
I wasn’t getting better. My job was still stressful and I was still internalizing it. And although I was a fitness editor of a national magazine, pressing deadlines and fear another easy jog would land me in the hospital again made my workouts fewer and farther between.
Part of the frustration was a lack of information. Heart disease is still considered a man thing, although more women have died of heart disease than men each year since 1984. Most women who have heart attacks have them after menopause, but estrogen isn’t as protective as they thought. I’m your proof.
Turning point No.1 was finding WomenHeart, the National Coalition for Women With Heart Disease. There was no local group chapter in the city where I live, so I went to national meetings, including the Women’s Health Symposium at the Mayo Clinic in 2004. And each time, sharing stories with other women helped me adjust to my “new normal.”
The fitness turning point came much later. Each of my heart attacks happened fewer than 10 hours after strenuous physical activity. I wanted and needed to exercise. But a lot of fitness information for heart patients assumes we’re all sedentary bon-bon eaters who need to rebuke our slothful ways. I wanted guidance on how to feel like I used to feel during a good workout–exhilarated, challenged and confident.
Truth is, being in good shape and heeding early symptoms helped me avoid grave and irreparable damage to my heart. Understanding that convinced me to stop blaming myself.
Two years after my first heart attack, I bought a heart rate monitor–a belt-like strap that I wear under my clothes at my bra line–and a spiffy red watch that shows the readout. Whether I needed it more as a lucky charm or a gadget to track my heart beats, it gave me the reassurance I needed. When I work too hard, it beeps to remind me to slow down. I programmed it with my weekly fitness goals. When I reach them, a little trophy appears on the watch and stays there all week.
Chasing my weekly trophy has kept me motivated and on track. So far I’ve lost 10 pounds. I’ve returned to teaching fitness classes and sometimes ride my bike to the gym. And I’ve learned that a low-intensity walk with my dogs is just as vital to staying fit and reducing stress as my harder walks are. Overcoming both the addiction to and the subsequent fear of exercise took some time. But now I have enough confidence to sweat to my heart’s content.
–Nichele Hoskins
Fix a Food Flub
your last meal with a bag of salty popcorn or chips? You can undo some of the
damage with your next bite by snacking on potassium-rich bananas, sweet
potatoes or edamame. These healthful snacks have a chemical in them that
latches on to sodium to flush out the excess and relieve bloating.
A Gift of the Heart
If you find yourself newly diagnosed with heart disease in the Kansas City area, Marie Burden might pay you a visit. Burden, 53, has been there. At 36, she was told she had heart disease. At 48, she had a heart transplant. So when she makes hospital rounds to meet women with heart disease, she speaks from experience.
She recently met a 35- year-old woman who doesn’t think she needs a transplant. Burden, who lives just outside Kansas City, Kansas, in Leavenworth, recognizes the denial. “When they told me I needed a heart transplant, I didn’t believe them. They asked me why and I said, ‘Have you ever heard of Tuskegee?’ “
At 36, Burden was a “perfect size 8.” On a trip with her husband she couldn’t get into a pair of jeans she’d worn a few days earlier. After climbing a flight of stairs, she started coughing and couldn’t stop. Later, she found out the swelling was caused by edema, the pooling of fluid in the body caused by the heart’s inability to keep blood moving.
She also learned she had a congenital heart murmur and cardiomyopathy. At 44, she had her first cardiac arrest and had to be shocked three times to be revived. Doctors implanted a defibrillator that day. Three years later after the implant she had three heart attacks in one day. The defibrillator saved her life. “It dawned on me that something was really wrong because I kept dying,” she says.
She waited 10 months for a donor heart and spent five of them reconciling with her need for a transplant and the changes heart disease had made in her life. After the transplant, she tried to find the donor’s family to thank them, but the family couldn’t be found. “I want them to know the organ wasn’t wasted and how much living I’m doing.”
Before her heart failed Burden had never given a thought to organ donation. Now she’s a staunch advocate. In addition to her hospital visits through the Pathways to Purpose program at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, she is a national spokeswoman for Women-
Heart, the only national advocacy group specifically for women with heart disease. Her desire to give back to her community and her gratitude to her donor drive her to look heart patients in the eye, tell her story and help them adjust to their illness.
“It’s like I got some money from a bank and now I want to pay it back,” she says. “What better way than to give back to my people?” -
–Nichele Hoskins
Understanding the Label Lingo
Fat-free — less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving
Low-fat — 3 grams or less per serving (if serving is less than 30 grams or 2 tablespoons, no more than 3 grams of fat per 50 grams of food)
Light — one-third fewer calories or half the fat of the regular version
Low-sodium — 140 milligrams or less per serving (if serving size is less than 30 grams or 2 tablespoons, no more than 140 milligrams of sodium per 50 grams of food
Lightly-salted – at least 50 percent less sodium per serving than the regular version
Reduced –when describing fat, sodium or calorie content, the food must have at least 25 percent less of these nutrients than the regular version
