A family saga. A medical mystery. A fight to save lives.
Dear Friends and Valued Readers,
I’m excited to share Before the Last Heartbeat, a long-overdue true story written with the intimacy of a novel. It blends humor, tension, heartbreak, and a real-life medical mystery.
You’ll step into the world of a family who loved deeply—an ordinary family forced into an extraordinary fight for answers and survival. To understand what came next, you need to know who we were before everything changed: what made us laugh, what held us together, and how we loved before the heartbreak, before the unimaginable, before our world turned upside down.
Nancy Toran Duitch is a visionary entrepreneur and philanthropist whose leadership has shaped some of the most recognizable consumer brands of the last three decades. A trailblazer in wellness, beauty, and lifestyle innovation, she has built, scaled, and successfully exited multiple companies through groundbreaking branding, e-commerce, and multi-channel marketing strategies.
Her career reflects not only creative vision and strategic foresight but also a profound sense of purpose.
In 1991, following the sudden deaths of her siblings, Nancy and her mother co-founded the Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome (SADS) Foundation, now known as The Future of Inherited Arrythmia’s FIA, later joined by the Cardiac & Arrhythmia Research & Education (CARE) Foundation.
If you or someone you love has experienced any of the following:
• fainting (especially during exercise, stress, or excitement)
• a racing or irregular heartbeat
• unexplained dizziness
• seizure-like episodes
• a family history of sudden, unexplained death
Early screening can be lifesaving.
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I want to thank you.
Your family’s work saved my four-year-old son’s life.
A ninety-three-year-old woman asked the SADS Foundation to reach out to thank me for saving her life, and the lives of her children, after recognizing symptoms that had plagued her family from one of our articles.
“Nancy opens her heart in this courageous telling of a family’s journey through SADS, and in doing so gives voice to the silent fears of so many. Her honesty, resilience and compassion shine through every page — she guides us through loss with dignity, hope and unflinching truth.”
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