When Kori Clausen’s husband Clint, the owner of Four Daughters Kitchen in North Manhattan Beach, passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack last year at the age of 44, some friends organized a volleyball tournament to raise money for the couple’s four girls’ college funds.
This year, Clausen wanted the money from the Clint Clausen 4DK Fours to go to something else: heart screenings.
The Oct. 10 event, which had 200 players and 40 sponsors, raised about $10,000.
Clausen calculated how many echocardiograms that would pay for, and then came up with another $1,000, making it 44—Clint’s age when he passed.
She donated the money to Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center Torrance to allow those who can’t afford the $250 the hospital charges to have the procedure, which uses an ultrasound to create an image of the heart.
If her husband had such a test, he would still be alive, Clausen believes.
“I know if Clint had done it, he would be here today,” she said.
In fact, her husband did take a similar but less in-depth test, an electrocardiogram, which measures electrical activity in the heart, the year before he died, Clausen said. But it didn’t detect Clint’s enlarged heart or the blockage of his arteries, one of which was 70 percent blocked, and two of which were 90 percent blocked.
“It was kind of like a false sense of security,” she said.
Clausen said she’s already heard from a couple of people who had echocardiograms as a result of her advocacy and are now seeing cardiologists for issues that were found.
“I know it’s working,” she said. “It makes me feel so good.”
Knowing that her husband could have been saved is hard, but it motivates Clausen to raise awareness.
“Now we realized, ‘Ok, we didn’t do that,’” she said. “But where the silver lining is we can let other people know and they can not go through the hard thing that the girls and I went through. You have to look on the bright side, or otherwise you will just fall deeper into a hole.”
For more information or to schedule a heart screening at a Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center location in Manhattan Beach, San Pedro or Torrance, call 1-888-HEALING or visit providence.org/heartscreening. ER
