do a lot of work, and that's how I got ahead, but
now, I need to have more of a balance.
Heart to Heart (Continued from page 24)
tried everything, sometimes your body just needs
that extra push now to get it over the hump. Take
your meds, take them as instructed. Know and reduce your weight, keep doing your nutrition and
also exercising.
Katrena: And enjoy life.
Rosetta: And enjoy life. Right. I mean, I have no
regrets now. Before I would push everything off.
There's only one Rosetta, and I need to enjoy that
Rosetta...do things that I wanna do.
Katrena: What’s next for you?
Rosetta: Professionally? That’s a good question.
What’s next for me – a couple of years ago it would
have been a very different answer. What’s next for
me is obviously to progress in my career and do
things where I’m passionate about what I’m doing.
I do have that luxury right now; I have a great boss
that I work for so there’s a lot of passion and a lot
of support from him. But I also really want to get
out and educate women about heart disease—not in
the traditional sense, like this is heart disease and
here are the facts. But begin to explain to them
and educate them: How does sodium affect your
body? What is cholesterol? What does that mean?
You say, “Reduce my cholesterol...I don't understand.” I'm in the business of serving customers
and engaging with them, and making sure that we
can educate them about how to get information
from the city, from the private sector organizations.
Katrena: So, a valuable life lesson.
Rosetta: Yes. Very valuable.
Katrena: What do you think your children got out
of this experience?
Rosetta: They're more appreciative of life. In fact,
all of them are looking at getting into the medical
field. My daughter—she's already graduated college. She wants to be a nurse. My son will definitely be a doctor. His uncle is a doctor. His father's in science.
So he's pretty focused.
My
[youngest] daughter wants to be an anesthesiologist. So they want to get into the medical field
[helping others.]
I'm proud of them, but they're
pretty proud of me because when they saw me [in
the hospital] it was not a good look. And for me to
be in the city, not having a lot of support around
me, they were pretty much amazed that I could do,
what I did. So, I know they're proud of me.
Education is key. I think we need to—and I have
this passion for saying—maybe the way that we're
engaging with people and with patients can be
improved, and I see a lot of opportunities there.
Just going on the Heart Association website, one of
the things I found out is that 80% of heart disease
is preventable. You don't want to get to the point
where I got to, where now you have to have surgical intervention. If you can at least a majority of
these issues on the front end by knowing, the risks,
knowing the signs, knowing symptoms of heart disease, being more proactive. That's YOU taking control of your destiny. You don't have to be a statistic.
Katrena: You see something in yourself that you
didn't see before; that's obvious just from listening
to you speak. I just want to say that you are really
an inspiration.
Rosetta: I know people like to hear the fascination
of what happened, but it's really how you come out
of it. And you could give up, because it's very easy
to get into self and go, "Why me?" I didn't go out
asking for a bacterial infection and to get to the
point of having two vales replaced.
That's not
something you wake up and you dream every day,
but it happened. 6