Coping With Heart Attack

In August, 2005, I suffered a heart attack 100% blockage in the left ventricle. I was then a 65 year old male with a family history on father’s side of heart attacks, but had been told two months earlier during my annual physical that, “You have the heart of a 40 year-old.” After an angioplasty and a stent, I came out of it with less than 5% damage to the heart muscle. Very lucky. The important part of this message is that I did not have the classic symptoms of a heart attack It was about 10:00 P. M. and I was getting ready for bed, but I felt weird, perhaps “anxious” is the closest approximation to a feeling I can’t really articulate. No pain, no feeling of pressure, just a weird feeling that I’d never felt before. My wife and I discussed it, and agreed that even if there was only 1 in 100 chance of this being a heart attack, that the consequences were so great that we should go to the ER, which we did. They did the tests and said I was having a heart attack. The moral is this: even if you don’t have the classic symptoms, go to the ER if there is the slightest chance it’s a heart attack.