Dr. Oz on Rosie O'Donnell's Heart Attack: "She Almost Died Because She Ignored These Weird Pains"

Dr. Oz said it plainly: "She almost died because she ignored these weird pains. And the reason she decided to come out and talk about it was with…" — and Premier Guide Miami was in the room when it happened.

On October 22, 2012, Sony Pictures Television held a press conference call with Dr. Mehmet Oz ahead of the November sweeps broadcast of The Dr. Oz Show . The centerpiece of that sweeps period was an exclusive interview with Rosie O'Donnell — her first public account of the heart attack she had suffered and nearly died from. Premier Guide Miami's Daedrian McNaughton was the first journalist on the call and asked Dr. Oz two questions: what surprised him in the Rosie interview, and what recommendations he gave her. This is the full story from that call.

She almost died because she ignored these weird pains. And the reason she decided to come out and talk about it was with the earnest desire to help people not die.

What surprised him — and what happens in the autopsy suite

I love your show. I have to tell you I had to stop watching — I was going bankrupt. With regards to your interview with Rosie, was there anything in that interview that surprised you or you didn't expect in terms of how the interview was going to go, and maybe she responded about her health or anything regarding that?

Rosie's a very insightful person and one of the reasons that I've taken more celebrity interviews this year than I have in the past — and Valerie Bertinelli's on today, we had Kirstie Alley on — is they trust us to have a real conversation that allows them to provide a service, but also they have unique insights often. I was stunned by how she went through the symptoms that she had, which in retrospect are pretty typical for a woman having a heart attack. Men have different kinds of symptoms, and yet she ignored them the way any other woman would. She ignored them because she didn't want to bother the family with having to deal with her issues. She went through this process — the weird pains, the shortness of breath, the dizziness, the nausea, all this stuff. Her kids were saying, you look like you're a ghost, you're so pale, and she was still holding out. She was putting ice packs on herself to cool herself down. And in the middle of all that there's this little whispering voice that said, take an aspirin, because she had seen a commercial when she was a kid, and she took the aspirin. In the course of her interview it became very emotional when she began to talk about how she ignored these symptoms, what that meant about how she viewed her life, how women view their lives often the same way. And the reason she decided to come out and talk about it — because the hard thing is she hasn't talked to anybody so far — was with the earnest desire to help people not die. I'll share something with you all: the first thing we do when a woman comes in to an autopsy suite who's passed away suddenly is we look in their stomach. We're looking to see if there's Pepto-Bismol or antacids in their stomach. We do that because we know that women often will have indigestion as their first sign of a heart attack and if they have Pepto-Bismol in their belly, it means they were ignoring the symptoms that were warning them they were about to die, so they died.

Daedrian's follow-up — the recommendations he gave her

Did you give her any recommendations?

Yes I did. I spent a lot of time talking to her about things she should be able to do in her own life, tips that I think will benefit not just her but people who watch the show. Oprah is the face of heart disease for women in America now and she will be probably for the rest of her life. Sometimes these moments occur that just provide an obvious teachable moment and this is it. Every woman in America from now on, when they're having these weird symptoms that women classically have — different kinds of pain than men have, fatigue and dizziness as opposed to classic male symptoms — they're going to be thinking, okay, I have this symptom, could it be a heart attack? Well, Rosie ignored it. I better deal with it. And then when they go to the hospital, women will leave the show knowing they're not going to go in there saying, I feel like I got a little thing here and there. They're going to go in there and say, Rosie had a heart attack with symptoms like mine, could I have a heart attack — because that's a very loud wake-up call to all the doctors in the emergency room to really pay attention to this woman. Because once the doctor hears that word heart attack, we think sudden death. So we can't put you on the back burner and get back to you in a couple of hours.

The widow maker — what happened in the hospital

Another reporter asked Dr. Oz to describe what Rosie's medical treatment involved. She arrived at the hospital in the middle of a heart attack and was immediately rushed to the angiogram suite, where she was identified as having what is called a widow maker lesion — a blockage of the left anterior descending artery, the most dangerous type. She was then taken to the catheterization lab where a stent was placed to open the blocked area. Dr. Oz said the show would display the actual images: "I'm going to show everybody exactly what happened, why this picture looks so alarming to us, how much of her heart was at risk."

Antioxidants, aspirin, and the fountain of youth

A reporter asked Dr. Oz about antioxidants and their role in fighting cancer and aging. His answer connected directly back to Rosie: "Antioxidants in many ways are the fountain of youth." He described oxidation as the body's internal rusting process — necessary to kill bacteria and cancer cells, but destructive when it runs unchecked. Colorful vegetables carry their colors because those pigments protect the plant from sunlight, and those same compounds protect the human body when consumed. He then made a specific recommendation: "I advise anyone over the age of 40 who are on the call now to be taking two baby aspirin a day unless you have a very clear contraindication." Aspirin, he explained, is both a blood thinner and a potent antioxidant — the same mechanism that saved Rosie's life when she chewed one during her heart attack. "People don't change based on what they know," he said. "They change based on how they feel. Whenever you walk into a grocery store, you're walking into a pharmacy. These are powerful nutrients and they are the foundation of your long-term health."

Sweeps, service, and the show's larger mission

Asked how he avoids the trap of sensationalism during sweeps, Dr. Oz was clear about the show's philosophy: "Everyone working on the show loves the show. We feel we have a larger mission than just ratings. We show up every day thinking, what's the service we're going to offer today." He described the November sweeps lineup — a show on the five ways to avoid aging, a new herb shown to help weight loss that North American audiences had never heard of, and a segment on growth hormone, which drops 80 percent between age 20 and 60. "I could've aired that show last week but I didn't want to because I'd rather people say, I haven't heard about growth hormone." The most common question he gets asked, he said, is simply: "I'm overweight, I can't lose weight, what do I do about it?" The Dr. Oz Show airs weekdays in national syndication, produced by Harpo Studios and distributed by Sony Pictures Television.

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