She hopes to finally get second wind

MISSOULA – When Joanne Steele was a girl growing up in Helena, she sometimes found herself feeling winded as she ran track.

Time and again, it seemed like she was looking for that “second wind” that athletes so often talk about, but it never really came.

“I just always thought, ‘Joanne, you have to get yourself in better shape,’ ” she said recently.

Steele went on to become a star golfer, earning a scholarship to Jacksonville University in Florida, where she was an all-conference selection in the Sun Belt Conference.

She did not, however, become a track star.

“I just thought that maybe track wasn’t my thing,” she said.

While in college, Steele was struck by an illness that was later diagnosed as pericarditis, an inflammation of the thin layer of tissue that covers the outside of the heart. Although she was hospitalized, she improved and doctors dismissed the illness as a temporary thing. But it wasn’t.

Steele still found herself winded at times, but it wasn’t until she was married and giving birth to her second daughter that doctors figured out what was wrong. By that time, she was head coach of the University of Montana’s women’s golf team.

Because her heart wasn’t working correctly, Steele’s other organs were starting to misfire, leading her body to retain water weight. That’s when doctors first uttered the words “hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.”

“That’s when I realized for the first time in my life that I might die,” Steele said.

The disease is basically a thickening of the heart muscle. Over time, the heart holds less and less blood, and works harder and harder to distribute it. In cases like Steele’s, the heart itself is affected.

For many, drug treatments such as beta blockers work to ease the heart’s work, while others undergo a procedure that cuts away some of the heart muscle.

Steele, 35, has been through the treatments for the past six years, and while matters haven’t become horribly worse, they haven’t improved.

Eventually she found out that over the long term, her best solution was the most radical – a heart transplant.

“It was a little bit of a shock, but on the other hand, it was good to know what I needed to do,” she said.

Steele expects to learn Monday whether she’ll be put on UW’s heart transplant list, and be issued a pager that could lead her to be called to Seattle at any time.