Staying fit was important to Linda Griffin, especially after she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. That came after the birth of her third child, April, when Linda was 29. Since then, she'd taken medication to control her blood pressure.
She was also concerned about heart disease because her father had two bypass surgeries. He later died from a heart attack when he was 62. After that, she started regularly getting cardiology checkups.
In Linda's daily life, she worked a stressful job as a dependency investigator with the Department of Children and Family Services of Los Angeles County. Linda enjoyed working with families and helping them reunite with their children. Linda also loved going to the gym.
After she retired from social work at 61, she was a regular at the gym. She also really enjoyed walking around the park near her home in Inglewood, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Just as Linda had been in the service of others in her career, she continued doing so in retirement, such as volunteering to help people recovering from addiction to regain custody of their children and counseling members at the church she has belonged to since 1979.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Linda, like most people, was forced to stop most of her activities. When her world slowly opened back up in early 2021, she of course felt happier. However, she found herself feeling inexplicably tired.
That March, at her regular cardiology appointment, a stress test showed some abnormalities. At.