Ten years ago, two heart attacks just one day apart changed my life forever: the one that killed my husband, and the one that didn’t kill my friend.

Now that friend, Paige Lehr, wants to talk about what happened so maybe you don’t die either.

“It’s a cautionary tale, frankly,” she said. “It can happen to you, you will not necessarily see it coming, and you have to keep yourself alive.”

According to the American Heart Association, the average age of a first heart attack is 65 for men and 72 for women. Both my husband Scott and Lehr — or Paigey, as I have called her for 30 years — were 44 when they had theirs. He did not live to have another one. She is working damn hard to make sure she does not.

We’ve been friends since our freshman year at Baltimore City College in 1985, but the startling events on July 28 and 29, 2015, have bonded us even closer. She’s my personal miracle, proof you can live through this thing. That there is a tomorrow.

At 44, most folks aren’t thinking about death, even if, like my Scott, there are underlying health conditions and a family history of heart disease. Lehr didn’t have that, but she sure had stress. She had what she she describes as a “high-pressure, high-pressure corporate job.” We were both products of the hard-charging ’80s with the societal pressure to fire on all cylinders, but without, Lehr said, the realization that “you might be killing yourself and it might not be worth it.”

She was also a busy sports mom of two daughters with demanding travel and local schedules. Lehr’s a great home cook, but when on the road between games, ”you just grab whatever, so dietary-wise, I probably wasn’t doing myself any favors."

There were small signs. A notably petite person, she was carrying more weight than usual. “By the time I got to the top of our stairs, I was winded, and we’re only talking about 14 steps,” Lehr said. ”I dismissed it.”

It’s a sentiment sadly familiar to Pam Mintz Williams, who was shocked to be diagnosed in her late 40s with cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle. She had surgery the following year and survived to become a speaker and advocate for the awareness of cardiac-related symptoms, particularly in women.

“We are quick to take care of everybody else and not ourselves. We think, ‘I’ll be OK. I’ll get checked tomorrow,’” said Mintz Williams. She cautioned that women can miss clues because the most commonly known signs of a potential heart attack — like a sharp pain in your chest or arm, shortness of breath and fatigue — are more common in men.

“Your jaw pain might be a heart attack. Your shoulder’s not doing what it used to do? It might be a heart attack,’” said Mintz Williams, who is also finance administrator for the Chesapeake Arts Center and, like everyone in this story, a BCC graduate. “Women are so used to pain we’re like, ‘I just got a little heartburn from eating that hot dog.’ Actually? It’s a heart attack.”

Before my talk with Mintz, I had been considering rescheduling my annual physical, set for the day after our chat. I immediately confirmed the appointment online after hanging up with her.

She scared me. Good.

Lehr said in hindsight there probably was a sign of something wrong a few years earlier, including her frequent, visible eye twitching. Her optometrist attributed it to stress, “but I didn’t really think ‘OK, that buildup of stress is going to threaten my life.’”

A month before both heart attacks, Scott and I tried to see the Lehrs on a visit to St. Mary’s County, where they still reside, while we were visiting from Florida in June 2015. But they were exhausted, driving back from a grueling soccer tournament. You’re busy. OK. Next time.

Next time never came.

On the morning of July 28, Lehr remembers her heart racing as she sat at her desk. “I thought, ‘That’s weird. Maybe I had too much coffee.’” She tried focusing on her breathing, putting her head between her legs and even putting a cold water bottle on her neck. But her heart seemed to be beating even faster.

“I googled, ‘How do you know if you’re having a heart attack?’” The symptoms didn’t match, but she called her husband, Charlie, for a ride to urgent care anyway. A car pulled up outside and she started to get in, before realizing two things: “This was not my husband’s vehicle, and also, my husband doesn’t drive a car. He drives a truck.”

Something was very wrong.

Charlie finally arrived and rushed her to urgent care, where she repeated her fear of a heart attack. The practitioners initially seemed confused about her lack of obvious symptoms until she got an EKG. The technician looked at the screen, then at Lehr, and excused herself.

“Then I heard the ambulance sirens,” Lehr said, “I asked, ‘Who’s the ambulance for?’ and she said ‘YOU.’ I said ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because you’re having a heart attack.’”

My sister called me to tell me the news not long after, and I thought, “But she’s so young!” I had no idea that less than 24 hours later, my sister would be delivering similar news to Lehr about Scott, but with a tragically different outcome.

I told Lehr that under different circumstances, I’d have flown to see her. Apparently, she’d said the same thing about me. “My husband, who’d been sleeping on this cot-slash-gurney in my hospital room, said, ‘You’ve gone completely out of your mind! This is the kind of thing that got you here to begin with!’”

He was right. She said she told him right there in the hospital, “‘Some things are gonna have to change in our household,’ and I’m sure that terrified him because that meant more work,” she laughed.

Change started gradually. She watched what the family ate when they dined out, and how she approached work. “I had to pay a lot better attention to myself, when I was accustomed to paying attention to everything and everyone else,” Lehr said.

Four years ago, when her youngest daughter graduated from high school and she no longer had morning mom duties, Paige began a four day a week early gym habit, something she doesn’t as much enjoy as appreciate for how strong it’s made her. “It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears — mostly tears — but I’m proud of it.”

Lehr once told me something that made me so sad: that she didn’t think people took her very real heart attack as seriously because she survived it, and Scott didn’t.

“In general, it’s that old joke, ‘But did you die?’” she said. “‘I had a heart attack!’ ‘But did you die?’" Because Lehr wasn’t visibly unwell, or, let’s say, on oxygen, “they give you a grace period of a month or two and then it’s back to business."

But it was serious, and she took it as such. Even though her cardiac event was almost completely attributed to stress, a decade later she’s much more vigilant about maintaining her blood pressure and sodium intake and limiting coffee at an age when it’s not as surprising for people to have heart issues.

“You have to take at least as good care of yourself as you do everyone else,” Lehr said. Now an empty nester, she’s looking forward to retiring at some point with her husband and spending time with her adult kids. “I can’t imagine not being here for them.”

Despite all she’s been through, she does not regret her heart attack. “I’ll tell you something that sounds funny,” she said. “I’m glad that happened, because it changed my life for the better.”

I am so grateful she has a life to change. We want that for you, too.