Rosie O'Donnell has heart attack; recovering at home

Comic and talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell is recovering from a heart attack, she wrote on her blog Monday.

O'Donnell, 50, said that last Tuesday, she became achy and began vomiting a few hours after helping an overweight woman in a Nyack parking lot squeeze out of a car. "The ghost of Christmas future: Me -- if I did not wake. There are no accidents, I thought . . . " Later at home, finding herself with sore arms, chest pain, clammy skin and nausea, she wrote she "Googled 'women's heart attack symptoms' " and found "I had many of them."

O'Donnell then took some Bayer aspirin, as she'd seen recommended on a TV commercial, but, "I did not call 911," she wrote. "The next day I went to a cardiologist. The doctor did an EKG and sent me to the hospital where a stent was put in. My LAD" -- the left anterior descending branch of her coronary artery -- "was 99 percent blocked."

O'Donnell's spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, told Newsday Monday, "Rosie is now home and resting comfortably."

"Know the symptoms, ladies," O'Donnell wrote. "Listen to the voice inside, the one we all so easily ignore. CALL 911. Save yourself."

O'Donnell, who grew up in Commack, now lives in Nyack and has four children with ex-spouse Kelli Carpenter.

Michelle Rounds, to whom O'Donnell became engaged in December, was diagnosed this spring with noncancerous desmoid tumors, also known as aggressive fibromatosis, and was recovering from a June surgery to treat the disease, O'Donnell blogged on Aug. 3. The illness delayed their planned wedding until next summer.

SEE PHOTOSRosie O'Donnell through the years