You can rest your limbs, take a breath, and clear your mind, but your heart never gets a break. Tashante McGaskey found that out the hard way.
Last June, she found herself in a hospital bed with an aortic aneurysm, a bulge in the wall of the body’s main artery that typically shows no symptoms until it bursts. In such cases, doctors told her, the survival rate is about ten percent.
McGaskey, a 46-year-old Stockton native, is a mother, grandmother, newlywed and, since 2012, a community advocate. Her passion for her hometown and its residents inspired her to promote criminal justice reform and culturally competent policing where she lives. To help balance her work and her home life she joined a spiritually-centered fitness community that gave her a way to care for herself.
“Just remember this, you get one body,” she said. “Your body is a temple. That’s in the word of God. And somehow I just overlooked that, you know what I mean, in many ways. But I thank God that I’m here to sow that seed in the younger generations about (how) our bodies really are a temple.”
When doctors discovered her aneurysm, McGaskey spent eight days in an intensive care unit, then two more in recovery at the hospital. While she was there, she FaceTimed friends and colleagues to let them know what had happened. She especially wanted to reach her fitness mentor, Nesha Ward, and her workout-buddy, Erica Burton, also a community advocate.
“We had a meeting scheduled with Tashante, and I had been reaching out to her and she hadn’t responded, and it just didn’t seem right,” said Burton, who works as a specialist for Stockton’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) program. “It just didn’t seem like Tashante… And then next thing you know, she hits me, she Facetimes me, and she’s in the hospital bed.”
Burton recalled McGaskey explaining that the only reason she missed the meeting was because she physically couldn’t make it.
“I’m like, Tashante, you inspire so many people,” Burton said. “I mean, that’s just you.”
In the years leading up to her aneurysm, McGaskey had been vocal with friends, family and social media followers about the five-year journey she undertook to lose weight and gain back some lost mobility at a women-only, faith-based gym called Genesis Fitness and Wellness, in Stockton. Other local gyms, she said, don’t take the breadth of women’s specific needs into account the way Genesis does.
“There’s yoga, there’s Tai Chi, there’s Pilates, but there’s not a space that blends all those things, and spirituality together, like to rehabilitate people,” McGaskey said about the gym. “It’s rehabilitating physically, but mentally too.”
Since June, her recovery process required her to rest, so she completely avoided her workout community. Her doctors told her the type of workouts she’d become accustomed to at Genesis could damage her body and her recovery, and that that chapter of her life was essentially over.
“They made me feel like I’m just gonna fall out and die if I do anything other than just sit down,” McGaskey said.
It felt like torture. McGaskey stopped watching her peers’ social media stories. It was too much to see them doing all the things she loved to do, the activities that brought her community connection and mental clarity. The isolation she felt led to a season of depression.
Stress had always been an underlying problem in McGaskey’s life, and workouts were one way she had learned how to manage it. Now, she had a compounded problems; she couldn’t rely on her workouts to maintain physical and mental fitness, both of which are fundamental to heart health.
In the U.S., more than half of all African American women, aged 20 years and older, are at risk for heart disease and other complications, according to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, a department within the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH advises Black women in America to be proactive about tracking habits that could negatively affect their hearts, and discuss them with healthcare providers.
McGaskey said it’s no surprise that Black women are at high risk of heart ailments, and described some of the contributing factors, including poor nutrition.
“If you go down the history, especially during slavery,” she said, “(Slave owners) threw them the scraps, and they had to make do out of what they were given to cook with. It goes that far back when it comes to bad eating habits and Black culture.”
Today, she said, a lack of access to healthy foods continues to create health problems in some Black communities where nutritious food is not always easy to access. She recalled a corner convenience store in her neighborhood being the main stop for her family’s groceries.
McGaskey also said factors including work, family, financial stress and race-based barriers to support and advancement make it difficult for many of the women in her community to create space in their lives for self care.
“It’s just so many things that contribute to that narrative of why we’re not healthy,” she said.
A month after McGaskey’s aneurysm, researchers at UC Davis called for more data to be collected on abdominal aortic aneurysms in women after earlier findings showed that the condition can advance more quickly in female patients. Researchers also found that because most studies on aortic aneurysms focus on men, women are underdiagnosed and sometimes misdiagnosed.
As McGaskey recovered and reflected on the external factors that might have contributed to her aneurysm, she felt a familiar pull to share her experience, and what she learned from it, with people in her network who focus on community health.
Her friend Burton’s employer, REACH, is at the forefront of promoting health in Stockton’s African American community, and McGaskey thought her story could help. Still, she was hesitant. Her heart condition had been a major blow to her confidence.
McGaskey is widely known for her advocacy in Stockton by her maiden name, McCoy. Following her brother’s death by gun violence in 2012, she advised a Stockton police chief on best practices for local officers and founded the One Woman’s Love Movement, dedicated to women’s empowerment. Since 2015, she’s worked with Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, a nonprofit with chapters across the country.
Now, despite her initial instinct to withdraw from advocacy, she decided to partner with REACH to speak to a group of Black women about aneurysms and heart health. The webinar was titled “Bless my heart.”
Most of the participants were part of the REACH Teen cohort, a group of African American girls ages 13 to 18, who are learning to be health advocates in their churches and schools.
In February, McGaskey decided she was ready to really get back to work. She went “on tour” around the community, sharing her story and advice during Heart Health Awareness month. She spoke at a local church and her fitness center, and she started searching for a way to get back to moving her body, getting her heart rate up, and engaging with others in her community.
Ward, Genesis’ founder, works with each member personally to help them understand their workout or nutrition goals in the context of what is happening in their lives. When Ward finds multiple members facing the same challenges, she creates classes specific to those members’ needs.
Ward knew McGaskey was eager to make her way back to Genesis, but wasn’t quite sure how encouraging she could be in the early days of her friend’s recovery. Still, she didn’t accept that McGaskey, and others suffering from traumatic heart conditions, should stop moving their bodies.
She was patient. She listened to McGaskey’s concerns then spent January and February considering ways she could bring her back into the gym. Then she came up with The Pause.
The Pause is a low-intensity, gentle-movement class designed for individuals managing heart conditions, post-cancer recovery, diabetes, osteoporosis, fibromyalgia, and challenges related to menopause. The class prioritizes slow, restorative movement to keep people active without straining the body, especially the joints and the heart, all in a relaxed, no-stress environment.
“I had a couple of clients like Tashante, who have been told by their doctors ‘no anything,’” Ward said after teaching the first Pause group.
“I just thoroughly believe that there has never been a time when God has not wanted us to not move our bodies in some way,” she added. “We know that we have often been told things by our doctors that may be sometimes questionable, and one of them is to, don’t move and do any exercise. I am not a doctor and I’m not versed in anything, but I thoroughly believe that there’s a way that you can keep moving your body.”
Ward normally leads workout groups of 50 people, but said the Pause class, with less than 10 people in the first session, was helpful for her own health, too.
“I really enjoyed that amount of people,” Ward said. “I’ve been working out for so many years, and I also have a heart murmur… I do my own workouts at my own pace, because my heart will start getting agitated very easily too. So it was really nice to be able to do a lot of those movements and stay in front of them and keep up without having to stop and be winded as well.”
A local practitioner praised the kind of approach Ward is taking.
Dr. Krithika Suresh, an internal medicine physician at Golden Valley Health Centers, said as long as patients with heart conditions like McGaskey are having open dialogue with their cardiologists, exercise is still acceptable.
“You want to get exercise no matter what,” she said. “There are options like water aerobics or strength training, even just walking around the park.”
Now that she is back in a workout routine, McGaskey has started to make changes in other areas of life, including how she celebrates.
“Just breaking those social norms, fasting and stuff like that,” she said, for example “during the Super Bowl when everybody’s eating and drinking. But I’m like, ‘No, I’m fasting.’”
Vivienne Aguilar is the health equity reporter at The Intersection, a project of the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact Aguilar at vivienne@cvlocaljournalism.org.
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