It was late afternoon on a sunny summer day when Lisa Williams
set off on her usual two-mile jog in Sioux Falls, S.D. Williams
was thin and fit and had made the run many times, but on this day,
Aug. 31, 2000, it would end with her collapsing on the front lawn.
Lisa Williams, at 43 years old,
had suffered a heart attack.
It was strange, because she had never had any heart problems before,
neither had anyone in her family. Strange, because she had none
of the health problems associated with heart attack.
There was just one thing she had been doing differently. Once a
day, every day, Williams for the previous month and a half had been
taking a pill to help ease the pain of a bone spur in her heel.
The pill was Vioxx.
“The cardiologist said, ‘I can’t figure out why
you had a heart attack. Your cholesterol is very low. You don’t
have any of the risk factors.’ My blood pressure at the time
was in the normal/high range, about 140/70 or 140/80,” she
recalled.
Now, Williams believes the reason for her heart attack was Vioxx.
Represented by Kline & Specter, P.C., she has filed suit against
the drug’s manufacturer, Merck & Co., which on Sept. 30,
2004 announced it was removing Vioxx from the market. Why? Because
Merck’s own studies showed an increased risk of heart attack
and stroke – as much as double the expected rate – in
patients who used Vioxx.
 Williams
at first had no idea she had suffered a heart attack. She stood
up after falling over on the lawn, pain radiating from her chest
down through her left arm and walked inside the house. She felt
woozy and thought that maybe she was coming down with the flu. She
went inside and lied down, sleeping for 10 straight hours.
The next morning she had trouble getting up. Her son and mother
helped her to the hospital later that day and tests revealed the
truth about her condition. Not only had she suffered a heart attack,
the left ventricle of her heart had been damaged as a result of
the episode.
“My doctor says my heart is functioning at the level of a
90 year-old woman,” said Williams, whose grandmother died
later in the same year in which Williams suffered her heart attack.
Her grandmother was 91.
As a result of the damage to her heart, Williams now suffers with
constant bouts of angina, a heartburn type of pain that causes her
mental anguish as well. “Anytime I do something, I’ll
have pain in the left side of my heart, which is very scary because
you don’t know if you’re going to have another heart
attack,”she said.
Besides the pain, Williams has had to undergo various procedures,
including a recent angiogram, to try to assess the damage. “They’re
still assessing the long-tem effects,” she said. “With
cardiac rehabilitation, they’re hoping that I’ll again
be able to function without the angina, without the pain that you
can feel go through your arm.”
It has all started taking a toll on Williams’ emotional state
as well. Williams, who now lives in Silver Springs, Md., said her
illness halted her work toward a Ph.D. at Howard University and
also cost her her job as a biological researcher at The National
Institute of Health.
“I’ve had to take a lot of medication and it slows
your heart rate, it slows down your whole life,” said Williams,
who talks haltingly, in what seem like measured gasps. “I
was terminated ... after I got sick and couldn’t do a presentation.
They told me that I was lazy.”
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