Sarah Casalan remembers many details of her night vividly of the heart Two years ago: First, he kept thinking he had indigestion from the hamburger he’d made for dinner the night before, though it was unusual, given his “iron stomach.” But then he felt so terrible that he lay on the bathroom floor, sweating and nauseous, for over an hour and found himself unable to get up.
“That’s when the alarm went off, although at the time I couldn’t imagine I was having one. of the heart” says Casalan, the president of UPS Store Inc. and a single mother to two boys who were 6 and 7 at the time. After all, she was just 47 years old, active and in generally good health. “And why would I think of a heart attack? when I was having one without chest pain?”
Casalan picked himself up and went to his mother, who was visiting that night, and “it was about five minutes total before I passed out thinking I might have had a heart attack.” It turns out that he had a complete blockage in the left ascending artery, causing what is known as a “heart attack”.the widow”—, which has a survival rate of just 12% outside women’s hospitals. (Doctors have since theorized this could be brought (For having an “over-swollen” heart after a battle with COVID.)
There were several successors cardiac arrest—sudden cardiac arrest—which required resuscitation, and putting the heart and lungs on life support.
“My family was advised to prepare and say goodbye,” he said luckand they were informed that his best chance of survival would come from here heart transplant. They were put on a waiting list.
Today, Casalan, who has led the 5,700-store chain since 2021 and shared the stage with the company’s CEO and CMO at a conference a few days before the health crisis and felt “ready to take on the world.” come out on the other side of a long road to recovery dotted with setbacks. But she’s keen to talk about it all, saying that “helping women in the workforce”, especially mothers, is a “personal passion”. health equity.
“So it’s a great extension of two things that I care about so passionately,” says Casalan, 49, now chair of the American Heart Association’s board in Chicago. “How do we model for women how they can be successful in the workplace and be successful mothers? Being a successful single mom? You have to be a healthy mother to be able to do all these things.’
Below, Casalan shares some of the valuable lessons he learned from his near-death experience: about leadership, parenthoodand setbacks.
Have a little faith in medicine
Casalan was on life support for many days and faced initial setbacks, including when he developed a blood clot that cut off the blood supply to his leg and foot, requiring major surgical efforts to save them. He was in the hospital for more than two weeks.
“I was sent home with a life jacket, which is an external defibrillation device that predicts a higher risk of cardiac arrest,” she says, and entered cardiac rehab. “The idea was, well, if you survive the first 90 days, maybe we’d get over that transplant idea… And I’m here today to say I have my little heart.”
Casalan has recovered most of his heart function. “My message is there: science matters. Medication is important.” At a recent appointment with her doctor, she was told, “Listen, you can do anything lifestyle stuff. You can do all kinds of things to intervene. But medicine and science are what brought you here.’
Listen to your body
Since his heart attack, Casalan has discovered, through emerging science genomic risk analysiswith a 70% higher than average risk cardiovascular diseases. If he had known, he might have lived differently years ago.
“I lived in New York City for 15 years. I worked in the fashion industry. I was single. I was living the most extraordinary and fulfilling and interesting life, sustaining myself on caffeine, bagels, M&Ms and dieting. Diet Coke“, he says. In those days, he recalls, his mindset was: “I’m in everything and everyone and everywhere, and I don’t have to take care of myself.” At the same time, “a bit of the typical mother piece and the typical female lead piece, like, ‘I’ll take it all.’ Eventually, that meant adding a “contentious divorce.” an already stressful mix.
What Casalan understood about doing everything and taking care of everyone but yourself is this: “If you don’t listen to your body, it will eventually speak for you… My invincible person was re-educated.”
Good leaders are vulnerable, and they know how to deal with setbacks
Casalan learned some great lessons when he finally returned to work. “In order for my team to trust me and understand where we were all at that time, I had to be very honest with everything, including what my limits were. And that was very difficult.” According to him, what he promoted was “our openness as a team to talk about the realities we are all dealing with and how we can help and support each other.”
The biggest change in his leadership style, however, “is how I take setbacks into account,” he says. Because of this, he faced even more challenges in his recovery, namely a 70% blockage in another artery, his left main artery, which was discovered during a stress test at the doctor’s office and immediately led to robot-assisted bypass surgery.
“This was tough,” he says. “I think I always anticipated there would be some setback … (but) it’s not what I expected, to pick up my cure and get off the rails.”
As a leader, in his mentioned “indestructible phase”, he shares that he had a tendency to “overcome all obstacles”, “there is no limit that we cannot eliminate”. We put our minds to it, and we can do it.” But the second blocked artery changed his way of thinking.
“The way I think about setbacks now is that some of them are out of our control and very far from our influence,” he says. And it is more appropriate to explore a range of options for how to move forward, understanding that they should be the pivot for a different way of thinking. “I think it’s opened up a lot of creative conversations,” he says. “Before asking or moving on, let’s spend some time thinking, what does this setback mean and how can we respond to it? And giving them the time and grace to do that has been very different.”
It really does take a village
When Casalan was unconscious and taken out of the house on a stretcher the night he had a heart attack, his two boys – both autism specter—unfortunately, they weren’t asleep. “They saw the paramedics take me off, and it’s still, you know, still a moment for them,” he says.
But they were quickly comforted and cared for by many people in their lives. “I am very fortunate. I come from the cast iron women line, they’re pretty awesome,” she says. His sisters from the East Coast, one stayed for eight weeks, and his mother stayed for a year. She also has an “extraordinary nanny.”
Despite the crisis, he remembers that with regard to his children, “the most important thing was that they were surrounded by love and a sense of security and optimism. We didn’t really talk about what happened until I was well; for example, we didn’t talk about the seriousness of what happened.” Since then, as they recently attended a local fire and rescue open house, they were all able to thank the paramedics who were there that night, giving them some closure.
Now, she says, she talks openly about her brush with death, especially with her young son, who coincidentally had corrective heart surgery at 10 months old. They sometimes “compare scars,” she said, and recently held an American Heart Association event together.
Both boys are also able to joke about everything. “They’re fun,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘Well, mom, you know you only live once! Except you.'”
More information on heart health:
