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“I’m a woman, so my experience might be slightly different. I started having chest pain during exertion, but it would stop when I slowed down. I exercised, mowed the lawn with a push mower, etc., for a couple of weeks. Then, one day, I was cleaning my house, and the pain didn’t stop. When I went to bed that night, the pain started in my left arm, and that’s when we went to the ER. When they first asked my level of pain, I said around 7-7.5. About 20 minutes later (maybe less), I said the pain was around 9 and increasing. They gave me morphine at that point, and it went to work almost immediately.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what did the pain feel like? Pressure? Squeezing? Indigestion/gas? There are times when I have pain on the left side of my chest, and I don’t know whether it’s the pint of ice cream I just ate or a full-on cardiac arrest.
I’m 58, and my mother has had two open heart surgeries, so I’m especially vigilant.”
“There was no squeezing. It was more like intense gas and pressure, and it was pretty much the entire chest area. It was a non-stemi [Non-ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction] heart attack, so it didn’t show up on the EKG. It was the circumflex artery, and even though it was 100% blocked, it managed to build its own ‘bypass’ so that part of the heart was still getting some blood flow, resulting in minimal damage to the heart itself.
The cardiologist put in a stent by going through an artery in the thigh area. I will admit I wasn’t the heart-healthiest person; I had high cholesterol and couldn’t take statins. I’m on a great cholesterol medicine now, although I still need to lose weight. I also have a family history of heart problems, except it’s just affected the men in my family.”
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