As serious as a heart attack about living every day

Her ancestors, the Romans, put it this way: Carpe diem. Seize the day.

Sue Maturo COURTESY PHOTO But even after 30 years in Naples, which is almost half her life (she's 63), Susan Maturo is still Chicago, in the best sense: funny, tough, smart and unafraid to tell it like it is.

A realist, in other words.

Although her grandparents arrived from the old country and maybe they said carpe diem, she's Italian-American, so she puts it like this: "Live every day, because you could get hit by a bus. You shouldn't sit around worrying about being sick."

As advice, it works for everybody. But Mrs. Maturo, the executive assistant at Barron Collier Companies, where she's worked for three decades, isn't offering it to just anybody. She's offering it to people like her.

Eleven months ago, the proverbial bus that struck and killed her mother at 52 and her aunt at 55 — a heart attack — hit Mrs. Maturo. More precisely, it snuck up on her, offering only the slightest hint of its deadly nature, a tingling arm. She never saw it coming.

"It didn't hurt. It was silent," she recalls.

Despite her family history of heart disease, she never thought it would happen to her.

Some history. Her grandmother also died of a heart attack, like her mother and aunt, and she believes her grandfather would have, if he hadn't died of cancer first. But that's not all: Her sons, ages 43 and 41, have both wrestled with heart problems or high blood pressure, like her brother and sisters. Oh, and her husband, Dennis Maturo, had a heart attack three years ago, at 61.

Hers hit her at work on April 10, while she was having a very bad day.

Her longtime and beloved boss, Paul Marinelli, was gravely ill in New York. His wife called to ask Mrs. Maturo to arrange a plane ride for the children, still in Naples, to go see him.

Only 40 minutes later Mrs. Marinelli called back with grim news: Mr. Marinelli was gone.

"I was totally coherent. I felt no physical pain. The last thing I remember is sitting at the desk and holding the phone to cancel the plane," Mrs. Maturo recalls.

Her co-workers say she went across the hall and told them her arm was tingling and she thought I was having a stroke. She remembers none of that; nor does she remember them asking her who the president was.

"Apparently I told them, 'George Bush, and Hillary's is going to be president next.' And we all laughed."

Next thing she knew, her son was staring down at her in Naples Community Hospital. Although her vital signs looked good two days later, when a doctor asked her how she felt, she told him, "It's like there's an elephant sitting on my chest." It was another heart attack.

Particularly unnerving was the lack of indicators. She felt no chest pain or similar discomfort in the upper body, nor the symptoms women are more likely to feel than men: shortness of breath, nausea and back or jaw pain.

And she had no idea that cardiovas- cular disease kills more women each year than the next five causes of death combined, including all cancers. Now she knows.

For heart-attack survivors, Mrs. Maturo offers this advice: Get over the fear.

"At first, yes, I was afraid, but now I'm not," she explains. "I'm the kind of person who, if I want the refrigerator moved, I move it myself. After the heart attack, I went around worried about things like that, but now I don't. I'm careful, I'm more aware of how I feel. I watch my diet."

And when her company's new exercise room is complete — with a variety of heart-healthy machines now being installed for employee use — she plans to use that, too.

There are small compromises now, of course, like her care with food (she never smoke or drank, however) and the daily diet of nine medicines she takes to compensate for her unreliable genetics and control blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol.

But she's happy to make those adjustments, she says. Life is at stake.

"The best part of my life is that we moved here 30 years ago," she says. "I have close ties to Chicago, but it's been 30 years of gorgeous weather.

"And the other good part is learning not to sweat the small stuff. Things that to me 30 years ago would have been monumental — now I can say, 'The world isn't going to stop because that didn't happen.'"