Heart Attack

Margo Dydek , a 7-2 former WNBA player who led the league in blocks nine times, died yesterday after being placed in a medically induced coma following a heart attack a week ago. She was 37. Her death was confirmed to the Associated Press by Cathy Roberts, operations manager of the Northside Wizards in the Queensland Basketball League in Australia, where Dydek was the coach. The Poland-born Dydek, pregnant with her third child, was stricken with a heart attack May 19 and collapsed at her home in Brisbane.

Rep. James J. Howard (D., N.J.) was in critical condition last night after he collapsed from a heart attack on a golf course in suburban Maryland. Howard, 60, who has represented the predominantly Republican Third Congressional District along the northern half of the New Jersey shore since 1965, was in the intensive care unit of the Washington Hospital Center, according to Mary Anderson, a hospital spokeswoman. Howard was stricken shortly before noon yesterday while preparing to play golf at Manor Country Club in Rockville, Md., about seven miles north of Washington.

Delaware Valley football coach Dick Bedesem got up to speak yesterday at a press luncheon at Villanova University and began by saying, "It's nice to be here. It's nice to be anywhere. " It was last Jan. 14 that Bedesem experienced what he views as his change of life. Two days past his 60th birthday, he stepped out of the shower at home and started to sweat. "And I felt this, I call it a rapid heart," Bedesem said, "although I'm not a doctor and I don't really know what it was. " A doctor called it a heart attack, and 10 days later, Bedesem underwent quintuple-bypass heart surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Question: I had a major heart attack about two years ago. My cardiologist says my heart pumps only half as well as a healthy heart. I'm on a number of heart medications, but can you tell me whether anyone is studying a way to restore a weak heart like mine to the way it was? Answer: A heart attack is the permanent damage and death of heart muscle resulting from a blockage to the blood vessel supplying that area. Once an area of tissue is dead, it forms a permanent scar and is gone for good - or so we've always thought.

State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo (D., Phila.) suffered a heart attack and was in critical condition at Hahnemann University Hospital last night. The powerful longtime lawmaker was eating dinner at his Spring Garden home around 7 p.m. when he began having chest pains and shortness of breath, spokesman Gary Tuma said. Fumo traveled by ambulance to Hahnemann. Doctors determined that Fumo, 64, had suffered a heart attack and that his right coronary artery was 100 percent blocked. Fumo has a history of heart trouble.

IMG founder and chairman Mark McCormack was in critical condition yesterday after having a heart attack. IMG said McCormack, 72, had immediate medical attention and was hospitalized. The company did not say where he was being treated. McCormack was picked as one of the top 10 most powerful people in sports last December by The Sporting News. His Cleveland-based company represents dozens of major sports stars including Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter and Venus Williams. Yesterday, McCormack was announced as the most influential person in sports management, as selected in the International Sport Summit 2003 list of "50 That Shaped the Last 25" list.

The pain wasn't bad - just a little tightness in the center of my chest - but it was happening more frequently, and this scared me. Having had a heart attack in 1980, I knew what it was: angina pectoris. Clogged with plaque, my coronary arteries were not allowing enough blood to reach my heart, and it was hurting for want of oxygen. I dreaded the thought that the disease was getting worse and that the time had come for bypass surgery. It was a decision I did not want to make.

No one can accuse Jim Marketto of shortchanging Cumberland County College's cross-country program. Marketto has every excuse to skip Saturday's Region 19 race, but he plans to be with his team anyway. On Oct. 20, Marketto suffered a moderate heart attack while mowing his lawn. He was released from the hospital on Oct. 23 and will accompany the Dukes to Saturday's meet in Sunken Meadow, N.Y. "I'm going to take it slow," Marketto said. "My assistant [Roberto Perez] will drive up there.

Philadelphia International Airport is now the safest place in the region to have a heart attack, other than a hospital. This week, workers will finish installing 50 defibrillators - the devices that paramedics use to shock dying hearts back to normal rhythms - throughout the airport. With heart attack the leading cause of death in the United States and defibrillators the only effective way to get the heart beating again, the devices are quickly catching on around the country.

Restaurateur Joseph V. DiLullo, who redefined Italian cuisine in Philadelphia with the trend-setting DiLullo's in Fox Chase and the dazzling DiLullo Centro in Center City, died Monday at Abington Memorial Hospital after suffering a heart attack at his Rydal home. He was 45. "His life was like a movie," recalled longtime friend Ruth Hirshey, spokeswoman for the Four Seasons Hotel. And indeed it was. Fun-loving, ambitious and a bit shy, DiLullo was self-educated in fine food, high style and entrepreneurship.