A nurse in neurotrauma and cardiac services, someone who had spent her entire adult life inside the healthcare system, was sent home from the ER repeatedly, told it was probably a migraine, given pain medication, and dismissed.

It took losing her vision before anyone took her seriously.

Sandy Goldstein had a congenital heart defect she didn't know about until her 20s. A hole in her heart was routing unoxygenated blood in the wrong direction, collapsing a vessel in her brain and preventing the release of cerebrospinal fluid.

What followed was weeks of misdiagnosis, brain angioplasty, a two-year insurance battle, and finally open heart surgery in August 2010.

Around one year later, she had her daughter.

Today, the American Heart Association recognizes Sandy as a Woman of Impact in Colorado.

She is in the final weeks of a nine-week statewide campaign: working with school districts, deploying hands-only CPR training, earning a gubernatorial proclamation, and closing in on the record for top Woman of Impact in Colorado history.

Sarah Lux manages the educational community at The Pause Life, the platform built by Dr. Mary Claire Haver, the physician who has become the most recognized voice on perimenopause and menopause science.

The community is free, serves millions of women, and exists to give women the resources and vocabulary to understand what is happening inside their bodies at midlife — because, as Sarah points out, most of their doctors were never taught any of it either.

In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Sandy Goldstein and Sarah Lux to make the case that women's heart health is not just underserved — it is the single largest cause of death in women, claiming more lives than all cancers combined.

They discuss:

Why cardiovascular disease kills more women than all cancers combined — and why most women have no idea
How Sandy was dismissed and misdiagnosed for weeks inside the very system she worked in as a nurse, and what it took for one doctor to refuse to give up
The direct connection between perimenopause, shifting hormones, and exponentially rising cardiovascular risk that almost no physician is trained to address
Why the black box warning on hormone replacement therapy was removed, and what was fundamentally flawed about the original study population
How women's cardiac symptoms , GI distress, jaw pain, vision loss — look nothing like the clutching-the-chest picture everyone recognizes, and why that gap costs lives
Why women remain underrepresented in the clinical research that sets treatment protocols, and what Sandy's AHA campaign is doing to change the funding behind that
What The Pause Life community offers women who have been dismissed, unheard, or simply never given the right vocabulary for what they're experiencing

Sandy Goldstein and Sarah Lux are proof that changing the narrative on women's health requires the people who lived it — and the communities built around them — to be louder than the systems that stayed silent.