Celebrity chef Ili Sulaiman's wake-up call to women on heart health

SHAH ALAM - Entrepreneur and celebrity chef Khalisah Sulaiman or better known as Ili Sulaiman, shares her terrifying experience of surviving a heart attack at just 38. Through her story, she hopes to raise awareness about the importance of heart health, especially among women.

Ili said in June, last year, she began experiencing symptoms like feeling more tired than usual and often found herself being emotionally exhausted.

She said she thought they were merely signs of stress due to work or due to her existing conditions of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis.

"From July to August last year, I felt like something was not right and my overall demeanour changed.

"It was easy to think that I was just burnt out," she said.

In addition to fatigue, she said she developed skin inflammation, eczema and psoriasis, conditions she had never experienced before.

Her symptoms worsened, as she experienced back pain, headaches, a clenched jaw and frequent nausea.

On New Year's Eve, she said her symptoms became even worse. She said she had terrible chest pain the whole night.

She said when her husband checked her blood pressure, it read 168/80 which was a clear sign of stage two hypertension

"It was very high but I only took aspirin that my husband gave because I just wanted to rest.

"I slept for 11 hours and woke up the next morning with my blood pressure never really going down. I had chest pain and immediately went to the hospital to get checked.

"Within just 10 minutes (at the hospital), they took my blood pressure, put me on a stretcher and informed me that I couldn’t go back home and needed to be admitted since I just had a minor heart attack," she said.

Thanks to her awareness of her body due to her pre-existing health conditions, Ili was able to detect something was wrong early on.

"I always know when my body is trying to tell me that something isn’t right. This time, I didn’t expect it to be my heart," she said, highlighting the importance of not undermining the case of stress, especially when unusual symptoms arise.

Ili, who had no prior history of hypertension was shocked by the diagnosis, noting that her grandparents only had high blood pressure at an old age.

She said her doctor told her that many women tend to ignore symptoms and self-medicate, often brushing off what could be early signs of a heart problem.

"I caught it early, which means that I can make lifestyle changes fast and take more preventive measures.

"Funny story, when my cardiologist asked about my level of pain on a scale of one to 10, where 10 would resemble that of a woman during labour, where my 10 would be my endometriosis, I only rated the chest pain at three," she said, asserting that she had high pain tolerance.

Ili highlighted the challenges many married women faced, juggling responsibilities as a wife and a mother while also working and often, they neglected their own health in the process.

However, she said if she refused to take time to care for herself following the incident of the minor heart attack, everything would simply fall apart.

"I started talking about it on my social media platforms and people started responding to it. Some advised me to take it easy since they saw me working in a stressful work environment," she said.

She added that people needed to pay more attention to their heart health since heart attacks among youths and women were becoming more frequent now.

"You only hear about men having heart attacks; you never really hear about women having it.

"Women are also at risk, especially if they don’t have a healthy lifestyle. Your lifestyle affects your cholesterol and your cholesterol affects your heart," she said.

Further addressing the prevalence of heart attacks among youths, she said some of her friends have had heart attacks and had passed away.

This, she said included her colleagues who were chefs.

She noted that diet was an important factor, followed closely by the amount of sleep and the stress associated with work.

"Slow down and go do your medical checkup even if you are healthy," she said.