photograph courtesy american heart association
Lori Sepich at an American Heart Association event.
For Memphian Lori Sepich, her long journey — from complete denial that she had health problems to her recent selection as an American Heart Association’s Class of 2026 Survivor — began with a headache.
Born in 1961, Sepich was the only daughter of Frank and Betty Sepich, growing up in the High Point Terrace area. Her father was a manager at International Harvester for 42 years, and her mother was the homemaker for a family that included two older brothers, Jerry and Jimmy. “I was born into a family of 100-percent heart disease,” she says. “My father and brothers had high blood pressure, and my mother never visited a doctor — until she had a stroke at age 69.”
Serious problems began when Sepich was only 17, a senior at First Assembly Christian School. “I started having massive headaches, but this went on for several weeks before I decided, let’s go to the doctor.” To her surprise, he said her headaches were the result of extremely high blood pressure.
But at that age, she says, “I thought I was invincible, right? I didn’t understand what high blood pressure meant for my future health, and I didn’t care. It just didn’t seem very important.”
After high school, she studied accounting at the University of Memphis, where she met a professor, Roy Fitzpatrick, who owned a printing company called Screen Graphics. She left school to work for him, a job she would hold for the next 30 years.
photograph courtesy american heart association
L–R: 2026 “Survivors” Alex Wilson-Garza, Migdalia Rodriguez, and Lori Sepich
Tragedy struck the family in 1986. “My brothers and I had visited my parents for Thanksgiving,” she says. “After I returned home, my father called. He had found my older brother in his bedroom, dead from a sudden heart attack.”
Jimmy Sedich was only 38 years old. Even that shocking event, however, didn’t make Sedich take her own heart issues seriously. A few years afterward, when she was 34, during a checkup her doctor asked if she had been taking her blood pressure medicine.
“I told him yes, and he replied, ‘Well, let me just call you out as a liar. Your blood pressure right now is at the extreme stroke level.’”
He gave her a choice: “You can go right now to the emergency room or stay here, taking meds to bring your blood pressure down.” Sedich remembers spending four hours in an exam room, and when she left the doctor warned her, “You’re playing with fire with high blood pressure, and one day you’ll get burned from a stroke.”
But she still didn’t listen. “Even though I had lost my brother,” she says, “I thought nothing was going to happen to me.”
Then came Easter Sunday, 2005. “I was 48, and when I got out of bed I felt extreme pain in both arms, with a crushing feeling in my chest,” she says. “I knew those were symptoms of a heart attack.”
Yet, as in the past, she ignored the warnings. “My family was going to Mass, and I had other things planned that day, so I didn’t tell them anything. I went shopping, came home, and went to bed.”
photograph by Bryant Cummings / AHA
Lori Sepich and a colleague at the “Your Heart Rocks" table at Tom Lee Park during the 2024 AHA Heart Walk.
When she woke up that Monday, with the pain still there, she didn’t rush to the hospital. Instead, she drove to work.
“I was handling payroll that day,” she says, “and the employees needed their money.” By mid-noon, though, she told her boss she was going to the emergency room.
First though, she stopped by her house “to shave my legs and put on a nice little track suit, because I wanted to look nice,” she remembers. She even paused to watch her favorite show, The Young and the Restless, before reluctantly heading to the ER.
There, a quick diagnosis confirmed a major heart attack, with some arteries completely blocked. She had six stents — tiny coils placed inside the blood vessels to open the blockages — and was discharged after five days.
Sepich refused to accept that she had inherited her family’s genetic disposition for cardiovascular disease. “I tried to convince myself that my heart attack was caused by working out too much at the YMCA,” she says. “I was determined to blame it on anything but what it really was. Then I started having deep episodes of depression, where I blamed myself for not taking better care of myself.”
“I just realized — hey, I’m a survivor, too. I’ve spent all these years in denial and there’s no reason to do that. I could share my story just like others have, and that helped to bring me out of this darkness. Maybe I could help somebody who was struggling to do the same.” — Lori Sepich
Dr. Keith Anderson with Sutherland Cardiology Clinic told her that depression was very common with heart patients. “He said, ‘Let’s get some treatment, and let’s get you through this.’” So, working with her primary-care physician, Dr. Lee McCollum, she “got on the other side of it,” taking (and soon teaching) spinning classes at the Y. “They basically formed ‘Team Lori.’ I couldn’t have done it without the help from my doctors.”
Thirteen years passed. In 2018 she began working for Ring Container Technologies. “Six weeks into the new job, I felt the familiar chest pains again,” she says. “So here comes heart attack number two, and I worried they would fire me. I was devastated.”
It was indeed another heart attack, and cardiologists inserted more stents, but she kept her job, since the procedure didn’t require a long recovery. Six months later, everything changed for Sedich — this time, for the better.
Ring Containers had been a longtime supporter of the American Heart Association, and her employer invited her to the local chapter’s 2019 Go Red for Women luncheon, the group’s signature fundraising and awareness initiative. Even with her medical history, Sedich says, “I didn’t want to hear about the experiences of others, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell complete strangers about mine.” Those who attend this luncheon usually wear red, “but I decided to protest by wearing turquoise.”
Once there, something entirely unexpected happened. “I walked into that room at the Great Hall in Germantown and saw that sea of red, and it took my breath away,” she says. “When I heard the first speaker talk about her heart story, I realized that was my story. What I had gone through was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be depressed about.”
The event changed her life: “I just realized — hey, I’m a survivor, too. I’ve spent all these years in denial and there’s no reason to do that. I could share my story just like others have, and that helped to bring me out of this darkness. Maybe I could help somebody who was struggling to do the same.”
photograph courtesy american heart association
A display of hand-painted “Heart Rocks"
Sepich became actively involved with the AHA, speaking before various community organizations. She also came up with the idea of “Your Heart Rocks.” She buys bags of small rocks from garden centers and paints hearts on them. “Then I just leave them for people to find and smile,” she says, “and maybe it’s somebody who hasn’t smiled in a long time.”
She quickly made it a group event, hosting “paint parties” at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s neighborhood Health Hubs, local schools, and cardiac rehab centers at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and St. Francis Hospital. “I encourage patients to paint the rocks, keep them, or pass them around.”
In 2025, the local AHA urged Sepich to become one of the group’s ambassadors. Since 2008, Go Red for Women has organized an annual Class of Survivors. Anyone interested submits a 60-second video about their personal journey. Out of some 200 applicants in 2025, only 12 were chosen, and Sepich became the first from the Memphis area.
“Lori’s authenticity made her stand out,” says Alyssa Paige, marketing communications director of the AHA’s local chapter. “She was transparent about not always putting her heart health first, and living in a state of denial before realizing she was part of a community of survivors of cardiovascular disease.”
“I’m just your everyday woman who fought this every day for a long time,” Sepich says today. “Now, I really want to be a champion for heart health — especially for women. I suffered for so long in silence, not thinking I had any support until I went to that luncheon, where I felt community, I felt empowerment, and I felt strength.”
