The veteran actress revealed she had a heart scare in 2018.
Susan Lucci has revealed that she underwent a second procedure for heart disease. The 75-year-old actress shared that she experienced the same symptoms that she felt when she had her first heart scare in 2018 including shortness of breath and discomfort in her ribcage and back.
"I thought, 'This is crazy. These are the same kind of symptoms that I had three years ago but it can't be,'" she said on Good Morning America on Monday. "But when I lay down, I started to feel a sharp coming-and-going pain in my jaw."
After calling her doctor -- who told her to go to the emergency room -- she went in for tests which concluded that she had an 80 percent blockage in one of her arteries as a result of a buildup of plague. Lucci shared that she was rushed to the cardiac catheterization lab, where another stent was put in her heart to open the blockage.
Lucci was informed by her doctor that if she had waited for her symptoms to get worse, it could have been a “major emergency.”
In 2019, the All My Children actress revealed to ET at the time of her first event, she felt pressure on her chest on three different occasions. When she went to the doctor, the test revealed a serious issue. "It turns out I had a 90 percent blockage in my main artery and a 75 percent blockage in an adjacent artery, and so they told me the next day, 'You just avoided a widow-maker,'" she told ET at the time. "I didn’t know! I had no idea.”
In another interview, the actress told ET how her medical emergency changed her outlook on life. Lucci noted that she "learned a great deal" about putting herself first.
"Heart disease kills more women than all forms of cancer put together, she said.
"I don't want to dismiss any cancers," she added. "We still have to do our exams and we should! But I learned, let's take care of everything and let's give ourselves permission to put ourselves on our own to-do list and listen to our bodies. If someone else out there is having a feeling in their body that is not normal for them, you go ahead and act on it. Take your symptoms and go to the doctor."
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