You know what a heart attack is supposed to feel like. It’s that sudden, intense, squeezing chest pain, like an elephant sitting on your chest. Right? But that’s not what most heart attack patients actually experience
Many others have symptoms that are more subtle and can be confused with other conditions. My experience is fresh – I had a heart attack on Friday.
I was doing my first mow of the back yard for 2017. I’d mowed the front and was about half way through the back yard. Over about five minutes I became unusually tired, breathless and started to sweat a LOT. I stopped mowing and thought about how out of shape I’d become. I started the mower again and in the next minute it got interesting.
My sweating and breathlessness increased even more. An oppressive pain, like a huge rock on my chest, took over. It was a steady, continuous pain. I realized I also had a terrible ache in my middle back, and then it radiated out to the backs of my arms – slightly more on the left than the right.
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I stopped and went inside. I collapsed down onto the floor and let my wife know I was in trouble. I asked to go to the ER.
I was at the nearest ER about 45 minutes after it all began, at 4:30pm. They had me comfortable and out of pain in about 45 minutes. There were drips and a couple of injections and some aspirin. I was admitted and taken to a hospital room.
Over this time my BP fell from 185/125 and HR of 160+ to a BP of 150/110 and HR of 120+. They had drawn blood at regular intervals and saw my cardiac troponin levels were rising. This is indicative of a heart attack. They decided to lower my heart rate and blood pressure. Drugs and a nitroglycerin IV were started.
It being a holiday weekend, I was moved again to ICU and monitored while they found a balance of drugs that would keep my blood pressure low but not too low. If it goes too low I was told I could suffer organ damage. The nitroglycerin is a vasodilator. It expands blood vessels and lowers BP. My main recollection was that it caused me to have an oppressive headache. You only get acetaminophen for the headache. This headache lasted from when they started the drip until an hour after they stopped it – two and a half days. The acetaminophen does not help the headache. If you’re a regular coffee drinker, the headache is worse. I drink coffee, so it was miserable.
I was woken and examined every three hours. At no point from Friday night until my release this morning did I get more than two and a half hours of continuous sleep. I handled this really well until late Monday night. The lack of quality sleep was very disruptive to my mental state and inner calm, even though I knew the blood pressure checks and stomach injections were key to my continued survival.
They kept me stable and out of cardiac distress until Monday morning. Over the weekend they had done various tests and imagings, including a CT scan and doppler ultrasound. They had a good idea where my problem lay.
Monday morning they put me in a twilight state and opened up my femoral artery right by my groin. They ran a wire up and explored the suspected blood vessel in my heart. All the likely ones were clear. While they were doing this I was hazily following along as they talked about rugby and a Hawaiian vacation. Finally the surgeon said, “It can’t be his left anterior, could it?” They jiggled and wiggled and stopped. They got real quiet. “Wow.” It was 95% blocked. Right at the junction.
They installed a hybrid stent. My heart function immediately improved to almost normal. On the way out the surgeon told me that for every one person my age with this specific blockage there were twenty or more in the morgue, and I was incredibly lucky.
That surgery was yesterday morning. They kept me in overnight because putting a hole in the femoral artery isn’t a minor thing. They released me back into the world at 11am this morning, Tuesday 21st February 2017.
I am feeling very blessed right now.
I have a selection of four drugs I have to take. A statin (cholesterol lowering drug), a beta blocker to lower heart rate and oxygen demand, a platelet inhibitor to prevent clotting (because who wants a blood clot in their nice shiny new stent, right?) and baby aspirin. I’ll have to take the platelet inhibitor for at least a year.
As for what happens next? Well, I will need to take it easy for a few weeks, and I have had to make some drastic changes to my diet to eat heart healthy. I didn’t even know I had a cholesterol problem.
With hindsight, it looks like I have been showing signs of stress for over six months at least. If I’d known that uncontrolled sweating under light load was a warning sign I would already have seen the doctor.
So, for me, that is what my heart attack felt like, from before it happened until I typed this.
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