When, at the age of 16, Jude Maboné, Miss District of Columbia 2023, suffered a heart attack seemingly out of nowhere during track practice at her Southern California-based high school, she was told it was a fluke. She went on to experience five more in the span of two years.
Doctor after doctor failed to diagnose and adequately treat what was going on inside Maboné’s heart until she finally found one able to prescribe a successful treatment plan. In the process, she learned her condition was possibly caused by either hormonal fluctuations or environmental factors, leading to heart attacks. However, to this day, nothing conclusive has been determined.
Once an active track runner, Maboné had to adjust to her heart’s capacity and regain her ability to run at a competitive level. All of this occurred at such an impressionable age that she endured it without telling hardly anyone outside her immediate circle.
“I was really embarrassed,” Maboné, now 28, told theGrio. “I thought that this was something that happened as a result of poor decision-making, and I didn’t want people to think that I had done something wrong. So I went through my two years of high school during that treatment phase, during my initial six heart attacks, and didn’t tell anybody.”
Maboné finished high school, moved to Washington, D.C., and graduated from college, all while keeping these ordeals a secret, for the most part. Then, she competed to become Miss District of Columbia.
As part of her run for the title, she was required to adopt a cause. Considering that she was a survivor of multiple heart attacks and the Miss America organization had recently partnered with the American Heart Association, she felt compelled to choose heart health.
“I thought, ‘You know what? I have this weird story; I have this crazy unicorn life where I’ve had this really traumatic thing happen to me. But what if I use it for something other than…
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