COVER STORY
Young family’s foundation aims at the heart Screenings will be held for 200 young athletes tomorrow JODY WEBSTER
Michelle Michelotti Gable and her children Matteo and Grace, 10 and 8, remember and honor their husband and father Michael Gable, who died in 2009 at age 38, with Gable Heart Beats, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to educating people about hidden heart defects and providing heart screenings.
A
fter her 38-year-old husband Michael suddenly died of cardiac arrest Sept. 17, 2009, Michelle Gable learned that he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which could have been detected with a screening. Then just two weeks later, her baby daughter Grace had a cough that kept worsening and doctors found she was suffering from an enlarged heart. Grace spent her first birthday in the intensive care unit and was diagnosed with dilated
cardiomyopathy (DCM). Gable became determined to alert others to these hidden dangers and help provide screenings to detect such heart defects before they proved fatal. She and her friend Amy Mayo — whose husband Stefan was in the band Segue with Michael Gable — founded the nonprofit Gable Heart Beats to work toward these goals. “We knew Michael would want to save lives. And we wanted to honor him,” Mayo said.
BY DOLORES FOX CIARDELLI
Tomorrow, 200 young soccer players from Pleasanton RAGE and Ballistic United will receive EKGs and echocardiograms at the Amador Recreation Center, thanks to Gable Heart Beats. “Ultimately it can save lives of those who may not know they have cardiomyopathy or any other heart condition,” Gable said. “In our family’s case, we had no idea about the condition.” HCM, an excessive thickening of the heart muscle, is the No. 1 cause
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Michelle, Matteo and Grace Gable present two AEDs to Pleasanton for its Sports Park at a City Council meeting in November with (from left) Councilman Jerry Pentin, Mayor Jerry Thorne, Councilwoman Kathy Narum and Councilwoman Karla Brown. Page 12 • February 3, 2017 • Pleasanton Weekly
of sudden cardiac arrests in young athletes, Mayo said, and it affects more than 600,000 people in the United States. Although Michael and his baby daughter Grace didn’t have the same cardiomyopathy, the conditions are related and hereditary. Son Matteo, 10, has been tested and is negative. For those who test positive, it is often possible to improve the condition with medications, as in Grace’s case, said Michelle Gable. Now, seven years after her 2009 diagnosis, Grace is doing “fantastic.” “There are no limitations on her activities,” Michelle Gable said. “She is playing soccer for RAGE, basketball for Pleasanton Rec, and she’s doing great in school. We see her cardiologist every six months.” Mayo said that the first thing they did after establishing the foundation was to look for others with the same goals. They located Holly Morrell in Laguna Beach, who pioneered the grassroots cardiac screening effort in 1999 with her Heartfelt Cardiac Project. They attended Heartfelt’s screenings done in the Bay Area. “We would observe and volunteer — and get a feeling for how the screening was done,” Mayo recalled. “Last year we did our first screening, we went to our first high school — St. Ignatius in San Francisco, where we screened over 150 students and staff,” she said. They collaborated with the Peter Patrick Madigan Antonini Foundation, started in honor of Peter, a 21-year-old San Franciscan who was about to enter the firefighter training academy when he collapsed and died while jogging on Ocean Beach in 2002. The screenings included both EKG and echocardiograms, which
normally cost patients about $1,500. “We learned about how many we could see in a day,” Mayo said. “It takes about 15-20 minutes to do the echo.” An EKG detects a heart’s electrical issues, explained Gable, and an echocardiogram takes a picture of the structure of the heart. “If Michael had been given an echocardiogram, he would be here today,” she said. “His was not an electrical issue but a structural issue.”
Michael and Michelle Gable enjoy their yo suddenly from a heart condition that coul