Heart Disease is No Joke

For the past few weeks my husband and I have been watching VEEP, a TV series starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. To us she is still "Elaine" from her days on Seinfeld, which is when we both fell in love with her. In VEEP she plays a nasty, bitter woman named Selina Myers who becomes America's first female Vice-President.

Enough set-up. In the episode I watched last night, Selina had a heart attack! She wasn't feeling well for a few minutes and complained of a back ache and feeling overheated, claiming the room was stuffy and making it hard to breathe. A doctor was summoned. After a quick exam carried out in her hotel room he diagnosed her with a myocardial ischemia, a.k.a. heart attack, involving a blocked artery requiring surgery to insert a stent.

By then, like ten minutes after she first fell ill, Selina appears to be fine and is greatly relieved it was "only a heart attack" and not the start of menopause. Next we see her being wheeled into surgery for her stent procedure, all business and barking orders at her fawning assistants as usual. Afterward she goes right home, no hospital stay at all, and never thinks about it again. There's no weeks of cardiac rehab, no diet counseling, no exercise regime, just life continuing as before, sort of like she had gone in to have her teeth cleaned.

The episode was not only ridiculous but insulting to all heart attack survivors. First of all, anyone who has a stent inserted is put on blood thinners for at least a year, no exceptions. That translates into the annoying side effect of having the slightest injury to your body cause a sizable purple bruise which hangs around for at least a week. (These days I look like a battered woman owing to my daily aspirin and Plavix.)

Secondly, according to the American Heart Association website, "Depression is 3 times more common in patients after a heart attack than in the general population, with 15% to 20% of heart attack victims qualifying for a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, and a far greater proportion experiencing increased levels of depressive symptoms." But not our Selina! She just picks up right where she left off with nary a thought to the possibility she could drop dead at any time if she doesn't properly take care of herself.

This trivialization of heart disease, which happens to be the leading cause of death for women in the United States, is demoralizing. Yeah, I know -- it's just a sitcom. Still, in the past six years this particular one has received 59 Emmy nominations and won 17 of them. Given that so many people put so much stock into this silly show, would it kill the writers to stick a little usable information into their laugh-a-minute scripts every so often?