TRANSCRIPT
Real Patients
The moment that I realized that these symptoms were something besides the fibromyalgia was that Monday morning when I got up out of bed. And the... both arms were on fire with this needle pricking.
When I first started getting the pains, they'd come and go every couple of days. Last maybe 30, 45 seconds. By the end, that last one lasted about an hour and 45 minutes.
Just a little bit of tightness and heaviness in the chest. Tiny bit of nausea.
Really hard, bad pain, couldn't breathe.
It subsided and I'd just eaten, so like a lot of people, I didn't associate it with having heart disease.
Actually went another two weeks before I ended up in the emergency room.
The pain just got worse and it started spreading. And then it went down my arm. So then my husband knew that's not, that's not gastro.
Having experienced that chest pain before, before I go up 30,000 feet again, I need to get some professional advice.
It was just, I think it was a routine blood test. Or something, maybe my cholesterol levels kind of gave the doc some kind of a twitch that something's wrong.
Because of my family history -- my grandfather died at the age I was at the time of a heart attack and stroke -- she sent me to cardiology.
My enzymes were off the chart and that he thought I was in the process of having a massive heart attack.
EKG had some abnormalities and my troponin levels were up. So that means heart attack.
I didn't even know it for a long time, but I obviously had had a ischemic heart disease for some time.
They rushed me upstairs to the cath lab and there they proceeded to put three stents in my heart. I was 58 years old.