Raymore widow urges others to guard their heart health

Erin Reynolds loved that her husband, John, had his office in their house. So did he. More casual. More time with their little ones, especially since he sometimes traveled for work.

Typical was a note he had left on the counter on a summer day. He had headed out for a short run around lunchtime and, as usual, mentioned the route.

Erin was home after gathering 7-year-old Will and 6-year-old Addie from soccer camp. Eighteen-month-old Eloise was along for the ride. They had swung by a friend’s house to pick up her youngster for a play date.

John’s note didn’t mention what time he left.

Erin launched into making grilled cheese sandwiches when a text came from a neighbor friend: “Have you seen all the police cars on Prairie Lane?”

She hadn’t. The two-lane blacktop is the main road past their small Raymore neighborhood.

“John’s just out for a run,” Erin thought to herself.

After a few minutes she called his cell phone, which he held in his hand while running, but there was no answer.

Erin figured he was drawn to the commotion on the narrow road, which mostly borders cow pastures and farms. A few minutes passed. She called the neighbor who sent the text, but she didn’t answer.

Erin walked out front but couldn’t see anything from the yard — until two police cars turned off Prairie Lane and down her street. No lights or sirens. In fact, she had never heard any sirens.

Then she saw the minivan of the friend who had texted. Suddenly, Erin heard herself shouting, “Where’s John? Is John at the hospital?”

“Ma’am,” said one of the officers. “We need to go inside.”

Erin looked at her friend, Amy Tuttle, for an answer.

“He’s gone,” she heard her say.

Gone? But before her morning errands, she and John had chatted about what to have for dinner. A police chaplain approached and gently asked her if she needed help talking to the children.

“I’m not even sure this is actually true,” she said.

The hours after a sudden death unfold like no others. Slow motion. Fast motion. Blurry.

Erin, then 33, pushed and pulled herself and the children through them, with loving support from family and friends. In the subsequent days and months, more able to focus, her thoughts moved in two distinct directions:

Was there anything she could she do to prevent this from happening to other families?

How could she help herself function in this new place called widowhood?

All she knew that day in June 2013 was that John appeared to have had a heart attack — fit and healthy 42-year-old John — near the end of his three-mile run. He had punched 9-1-1 into his cell phone, but he hadn’t hit “send.”

Eventually on that day, like any other day, it was time for bed. Erin put Eloise in her crib. Then she, Will and Addie each chose a shirt of John’s to put on.

“And we went to bed together, crying,” she said. “Their little faces … ”

A year and three months have passed since John’s death, and Erin is planning something special on Oct. 9 to honor John on what would have been their 10th wedding anniversary.

A fundraiser called the John Reynolds Memorial Fore Your Heart Golf Tournament — John loved golf — at Creekmoor golf course in Raymore will benefit two organizations, Saint Luke’s Foundation and Soaring Spirits International.

The hospital’s foundation to help educate about heart disease, she says, and Soaring Spirits because of what she’s learned about widowhood.

“I’m a private person,” Erin says. “It’s not delightful for me to get on a platform. But this is so important.”

The initial autopsy was inconclusive about John’s death, so extra analysis was needed on his heart. It took six weeks, and the results were a shock — the primary cause of death was “atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.” Plaque had built up in John’s arteries.

“It didn’t make sense,” Erin says. “John was one of the healthiest people I knew. How could this have happened to him?”

Erin learned that such plaque build-up was unusual for a person so young, something John no doubt knew in his job assessing medical risk for life insurance policies.

But he didn’t know some of the details of his own health, such as his cholesterol levels and blood pressure. His family history was a bit of a mystery because his father died in his 30s in a hunting accident.

John, 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds, hadn’t been to the doctor for a check-up in a couple years.

“He didn’t make it a priority, and I know why,” Erin says. “He thought he was managing his health. Maybe things would have been different if we had heard a story like this.”

Tracy Stevens, cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, said it behooves all adults, no matter how healthy they are, to keep close tabs on cholesterol levels and blood pressure, possible warning signs of heart disease.

“I would love for everyone in our community to have a blood pressure cuff in their home,” Steven says, or to otherwise document a blood pressure reading once a month.

To help control plaque, borderline and dangerous cholesterol levels and blood pressure readings can be treated with an anti-inflammatory diet, exercise and medication, she says.

Think of plaque in the coronary arteries as something like acne, Steven says, pimples that fill, inflame, burst and form scars. Blood flow is reduced over time and sometimes even stopped. Exertion from exercise can play a role in sudden events.

“When the blood flow is suddenly stopped, the heart muscle gets electrically violent and goes into a fatal heart rhythm without warning,” she says.

Erin says that several cardiologists she consulted told her that John’s death likely came quickly, just a couple minutes after the time he felt something was wrong.

“Still that’s hard to think about, even two minutes,” she says.

Erin first made contact with Saint Luke’s Hospital after she heard a radio ad for CardioScan, an imaging machine that takes a series of pictures of the heart arteries and provides a “score” of calcified plaque buildup. It and similar scans are available at area hospitals, typically for $50 and usually not covered by insurance.

While such scans aren’t routine, Erin wished she had known about them. In John’s case, a heart scan could have meant detection of his early heart disease, she says.

“I didn’t have a chance to do anything to prevent John’s death,” she says.

People age 40 and above can make an appointment for a CardioScan at Saint Luke’s, Stevens says. Those younger, with a family history of heart disease or other risk factors, must be referred by a physician.

“You want your ‘score’ to be a big zero,” Stevens says. “If there is plaque, we offer recommendations and referrals.”

In an effort to get spouses to monitor heart health together, the Saint Luke’s Women’s Heart Center offers a $175 package that includes CardioScans and blood work for couples. Sometimes one spouse can persuade the other if they go together, Stevens says.

“This is a disease that, for the most part, we can prevent,” she says.

After John’s death, besides learning about heart disease, Erin knew she needed to learn about widowhood. How to go about it was not obvious.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around ‘widow,’” she says. “No one in my world, in my circle of friends, had lost their spouse.”

She felt hopeless at times, and she knew that wasn’t right. Would she watch the clock, waiting to be with John?

“I was just so eager to absorb anything that would help me make sense of my life, to know where I could go from here,” she says.

Erin and the children talked to grief counselors and therapists, which helped all of them. Then she discovered a group for widows and widowers called Soaring Spirits International.

She found kindred souls in the group’s protected chat rooms. And she read about Camp Widow, the organization’s weekend gatherings held twice a year in the United States and once in Canada.

Michele Neff Hernandez, who founded Soaring Spirits six years ago after her husband died, said the organization’s online and in-person programs are forward-looking.

“When your spouse or partner dies, everything changes, and you have to rebuild,” Hernandez says.

“At first you don’t have the will to rebuild,” she says. “Mostly you want to have back what you had. But you have to make choices, choices to create a new full life that honors the love you had but allows you the joy of the present.”

Six days before last February’s Camp Widow in Tampa, Fla., Erin woke up with the idea that she needed to be there. So she went.

“From the second I stepped foot in that hotel and connected with these people, that flicker of hope started rising in me,” Erin says. “I thought, ‘Look at all these people. Maybe I can get through this.’”

About 150 in all, some were recently widowed, some had lost their spouses many years ago and some were remarried and brought their new spouses. Meeting with them and hearing expert speakers was a turnaround for her.

“It was so pivotal in my recovery, my journey,” she says. “I want to raise funds to get more people to Camp Widow who might not be able to go.”

This story was originally published September 28, 2014 at 7:00 AM.