Her physical detected a severe heart murmur. No one suspected a cardiac problem until she took a summer job as a stenographer at NASA in 1966. She had trouble breathing at times, but her family doctor chalked that up to asthma. A saxophonist, she marched in her high school band. Growing up in Huntsville, Smith was an active kid.
Bicuspid valves tend to leak and narrow, which forces the heart to work harder. Smith was born with bicuspid aortic valve disease, a condition in which the valve that controls blood flow from the left ventricle to the aorta has two flaps instead of three. She called back and, as she describes it, “I threatened to go to the Blue Cross Blue Shield office, the main office, and chain myself to the door and call the news media and say, ‘Look what they’re doing to this poor old lady who’s just trying to get her drugs.’”Ī lifelong Alabama resident with the drawl to match, Smith speaks quickly and assertively, a demeanor that makes sense considering she’s spent her adult life with a “ticking time bomb” for a heart. I’m going to do something drastic here, the 72-year-old Smith recalls thinking to herself. “That’s our policy,” the supervisor said, and hung up. So one more time, Smith picked up the phone and called the toll-free number on the back of her Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance card. Her insurance company had no business telling her she couldn’t have it. There was a medication that could save her life when nothing else had worked. She was exhausted and exasperated, tired of hearing that the rules were the rules. After four years of fighting, Donnette Smith reached her breaking point.
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