Sometimes, how we healthcare means calling a time-out on a life that looks perfectly healthy from the outside.
Kim Mulkey doesn’t do anything halfway. She coaches at full volume, leads with full commitment and shows up with the kind of energy that fills a room before she opens her mouth. So, when she walked into a routine checkup feeling strong, there was no reason to expect what came next.
Not “watch this for a while.” Not “we’d like to run a couple more tests.” A 95% blockage in her coronary artery, and not a single symptom to her name. No chest pain. No fatigue she couldn’t explain away. Nothing that pointed to the fact that her heart, the one she’d given to the game for decades, was quietly running out of road.
The Call Nobody Expects After Winning a National Title
May 2023. LSU had just won the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship. Coach Mulkey was in the middle of celebrating with her team, gearing up for a White House visit, riding the kind of high that comes once in a career, maybe.
Then cardiologist Carl Luikart, MD, at FMOL Health | Our Lady of the Lake Heart & Vascular Institute, looked at her imaging and didn’t like what he saw. A stress echocardiogram showed blockage that couldn’t be ignored. Coach Mulkey had come in for something routine following a previous surgery. She left with a conversation she hadn’t planned for.
She asked him straight. “Was I going to have a heart attack?”
He gave her a straight answer. Eventually, yes.
That’s the thing about cardiovascular disease in women. It doesn’t always announce itself. It doesn’t always show up as the dramatic, unmistakable chest-clutching moment people expect. It shows up silently, builds quietly and waits. Coach Mulkey had a family history, including her mother, but no red flags she could point to. Just a number on a scan that stopped everything.
She Finished the Celebration. Then She Got to Work.
Coach Mulkey didn’t cancel the White House trip. She didn’t hand the reins to anyone. She made a plan with her care team and kept her commitments to her players, knowing the procedure would follow once the season’s obligations were complete.
That’s not recklessness. That’s a woman and a care team who understood each other. Dr. Luikart monitored her closely, quietly watching on television every time she appeared at another celebration, confident in the testing but never fully exhaling.
When June arrived, so did Federico De Puy, MD, an interventional cardiologist at Our Lady of the Lake whose specialty is exactly this: the blocked, the backed-up and the dangerously narrow. He works in the structures of the heart, and Coach Mulkey’s needed immediate attention.
Two Stents. Same Day. Back in the Game.
Dr. De Puy went in through her wrist, guided a catheter to the blocked artery and placed two stents, small mesh tubes that hold the artery open and let blood flow the way it’s supposed to. The whole procedure was minimally invasive. Coach Mulkey went home the same day.
“She tolerated it like a champ,” Dr. De Puy says. “She’s a very hard worker, and she’s got the heart of a champion, that’s for sure.”
Heart Disease Is a She Thing. Start Saying It Out Loud.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women. Not one of the leading causes. The leading cause. And yet women are dramatically more likely to underestimate their own risk, in part because the symptoms often don’t look like what they’ve seen in movies or read in pamphlets.
“What I’ve noticed in my female patients is that they’ll often describe chest discomfort, not so much pain, but discomfort, and some shortness of breath,” Dr. De Puy says. Fatigue after exertion. A feeling of being off that’s easy to attribute to a busy life. These signals deserve a doctor’s attention, not a shrug.
The guidance is clear. Women over 50, especially those with a family history of heart disease, should be talking with their primary care provider about heart screenings: an EKG, a cholesterol test, a stress test. Not someday. Now.
Coach Mulkey felt completely fine. That’s exactly the point.
What She’s Fighting For Now
Coach Mulkey is back on the sideline. Back in the gym. Back in full voice. But something shifted in how she moves through the world.
“You never think it’s going to happen to you, and it does,” she says. “I was fortunate. So if me sharing my story makes somebody subconsciously think, ‘You know what, let me go get checked out,’ go do it. Me sharing my story may save somebody’s life.”
Coach Mulkey has spent her career building champions. Now she’s using that same intensity to fight for something more important than a trophy, because heart disease is a she thing, and it deserves a coach willing to go loud about it.
FMOL Health | Our Lady of the Lake Heart & Vascular Institute is fighting alongside her. And alongside every woman who deserves to know her own risk before a scan does it for her.
Sometimes, how we healthcare is catching what you can’t feel, treating the whole person and sending her home the same day with a reason to keep showing up. This is how we healthcare.
