Jennifer Denton and Karol White have never met, but they have lots in common. Neither seemed a likely candidate for heart attack. Each was stunned to learn she needed heart bypass surgery. Both have recovered nicely.

Their stories are not uncommon, says Kristen Iglesias, a nurse in Upstate‘s Heart and Vascular Center. Symptoms of heart attack are different for women, more subtle than those for men. “I think women tend to overlook symptoms. I think they‘re so busy taking care of everything else and everyone else that they tend to put themselves last.”

Iglesias says many of her female patients have a difficult time relaxing and focusing on themselves. “I lay it out straight: I tell them ‘in order for you to be there for your family in the future, you need to take care of you right now,‘ ” -- and she says that usually works.

Denton and White agreed to share their stories:

Jennifer Denton, 57, of Brewerton works part time as an office manager for a construction company, and she teaches Zumba exercise dance classes.

No one in her family has had heart trouble, but Denton smoked cigarettes. She figured that getting out of breath during her Zumba class meant she was working harder than normal. She would reduce her intensity and power through the class.

She remembered 10 years ago when her doctor ordered an EKG that revealed the electrical activity of her heart and showed her the tracing. “This is what everybody‘s EKG should look like,” he told her.

“This is one of the things that kept me from getting checked out,” she says.

But by May 2010, the shortness of breath troubled her enough to mention it to her doctor, who sent her to a cardiologist for a cardiac stress test and evaluation.

Denton had a heart catheterization and learned that three of her vessels were severely blocked, which can often lead to a fatal heart attack.

Early the next morning, Gregory Fink MD, Upstate‘s chief of cardiac surgery, operated on Denton to bypass the diseased vessels.

Within six months, she was back to teaching Zumba. And, she managed to conquer cigarettes.

“I have to attribute that to my faith, to my God, because I did pray about it,” she says. She tried quitting multiple times. Just before her stress test, she quit for good.

Karol White, 46, of Baldwinsville was familiar with heart attack symptoms in women. She works in the health care field as a branch manager for GENEX, a national company that provides cost-containment and care management services.

But the odd sensation in her chest that developed in October made no sense. “It really wasn‘t what I had read about,” she says. She felt a thickening on her sternum, as if a piece of Styrofoam was there. It wasn‘t painful, just odd, and it would go away when she took a break.

White was healthy. She ate right, took no medications, walked five miles a day, had no risk factors for heart disease.

“My brain said ‘that must be your heart‘ because of where it was -- and yet there was just no way that it could be. I was not out of breath. I was not sweating.”

If she rested, the sensation usually went away. Sometimes it would return. This went on for several days. Then she attended a Friday night wedding. The sensation returned when she got up to dance. “I said ‘OK, something‘s not right.‘

That Sunday when the sensation came back while she was driving, she told her husband about it. She made an appointment the next morning to see her doctor. He looked at her EKG and sent her next door to see Timothy Ford MD, who looked at the tracing and used a sonogram to examine White‘s heart.

“How did you get here today?” he asked her. Thinking Ford was making polite conversation, White easily answered that she drove. Then the doctor told her she had to go straight to the hospital. She could go by ambulance or have someone drive her, but she could not drive herself.

All White could think of was, “I have to cook dinner… I have a dog to walk… I have these reports...” She was admitted and quickly learned that one vessel was 100 percent blocked, a second was 95 percent blocked and a third was 60 percent blocked.

Charles Lutz MD did a triple bypass on White, who remembers doctors continually approaching her bedside in search of any potential causes for the severity of her disease. No, she would tell them, she never smoked. No, she was not under high levels of stress. She says she went home from the hospital three days after surgery, Lutz telling her that her heart should last another 50 years.

Three months after surgery, White says her life is pretty much back to normal. She‘s walking a couple of times a week and slowly building back to five miles.

“It‘s so surreal to me that it happened. I have to remind myself that I had heart surgery,” White says. “It happened, and I‘m moving on.

The free "Strong Women, Strong Hearts" event takes place Feb. 4.