A few years earlier I had to have an intense physical for a job. The heart doctor told me at the time, "You have a heart like a mule, you'll never have to worry about a heart attack."
Several years later I started having chest pain one day at work. I discounted heart attack right away because of what I had been told.
I have always been a person with a cast iron stomach - I could eat road kill and the tire that killed it with no problems. My chest started hurting so bad I thought that maybe I finally was getting heartburn or something. It hurt so bad I couldn't believe that other people would just chew a Tums and go on their way.
I got home from work that evening and it kept hurting worse and worse. By then I had pain shooting down my arms. I told myself that I would just go to bed and if I still hurt in the morning, I would go see my doctor.
I woke up at 3:00 AM in incredible pain. I sat up and found myself soaking wet. I immediately threw up with no warning and just made it to the bathroom where I had a terrible episode of diarrhea. I went back to bed and tried to go back to sleep, but the pain in my arms and especially in my palms was so bad I couldn't go to sleep.
All of a sudden I got very dizzy and started to black out.
Then it finally hit me - I was having a heart attack and was actually dying.
I called a friend who lives a few blocks away and asked her to come and get me and take me to the emergency room. She told me I should call 911, but I told her I didn't want flashing lights and sirens and all the fuss all over some bad pizza (which I had for lunch that day).
She came and picked me up. This was a hot August night - 95 degrees and steamy, but as Susan was driving me to the hospital I was shivering with cold. Luckily, Susan had an old dog blanket in the back of her car - I wrapped up in that and was still freezing. I couldn't stop my teeth from chattering.
Susan had quit smoking a year before this. I told her, "I know you don't want me smoking in your car - but I'm sure this is the last cigarette I'll ever have. If I die I won't smoke anymore and if I live I'll have to quit smoking.
I was smoking that last cigarette as I went through the Emergency Room doors.
I went to the desk and told them I was having chest pains. They asked me how bad the pain was on a scale of 1 to 10. I told them it was about 25.
They rushed me back, tore my clothes off me and started pumping morphine into me. A minute later a doctor was bending over me and said, "Sir, I'm going to be blunt with you. You are having a massive heart attack."
I asked him, "Will I live?" He replied, "I don't know. We are going to rush you into the Cath lab and try to save you. If you had waited another 30 minutes - you would already be dead."
I wasn't scared when he told me I was having a heart attack - but I was absolutely terrified when he told me about the 30 minutes, especially since I had put off coming to the hospital all day.
They did the angioplasty and through my morphine haze I asked again, "Will I live?"
The heart surgeon said, "If you make it through the next 24 hours - you might." He told me I had what they call the "Widow Maker" - a Left Anterior Descending blockage.
I asked him, "Why did I have a heart attack? I am in perfect health, I have low blood pressure, I have low cholesterol, I have no family history of heart disease."
He replied, "I can tell you in three words. Two packs of Kools a day."
I said, "That's more than three words, but I get your drift." He replied, "If you live through this you must NEVER smoke again - or you'll die, it's that simple."
Later, I overheard a couple of the nurses talking outside the ICU room. One of them said, "That was a record - we got him in within 10 minutes of him coming through the doors."
Needless to say - that cigarette coming through the emergency room doors was my last.
What was really weird about all this is that when I was first hit with the morphine just before they wheeled me into the cath lab, I had the distinct impression of being surrounded by a group of very tall figures. I couldn't really see who they were, but I could definitely feel them all around me. Because I was so zoned (and scared) I dismissed it from my mind.
I never told anyone about it, because it sounded crazy. It wasn't until several weeks later, when I was home from the hospital (after 6 days in Intensive Care and 14 days in the Cardiac ward) that my sister told me something that sent icy chills up and down my spine.
She said that Susan had called her about 3:30 AM and told her about my heart attack. She lived on the far East side and had a bit of a distance to travel to get to the hospital I was in. She said she was praying the whole way. My younger brother had died tragically a year before this. My sister said in her prayers she asked my brother Steve to put in a good word for me. She said all of a sudden she heard his voice saying, "Don't worry - he's being protected." She said she could see me laying in a hospital bed and that there were 6 tall shining winged figures surrounding my bed holding large shining swords. She said she was instantly filled with a sense of relief and confidence that I was going to live.
While I have always been a fairly religious and spiritual person - I never really gave a lot of credence to "guardian angels" protecting us. When my sister told me about the vision she saw and when I remembered sensing a group of figures standing around my hospital bed - It scared the beejeebies out of me.
I realized that angels must be real and that they must have saved my life.
Think what you want - maybe it was a drug-indiced hallucination, but if it was, how did my sister see it from 20 miles away?
To this day, I thank God every single day for saving my life.
I still firmly believe that something or someone stepped in and saved me. For what reason, I don't know yet - maybe it was just to spare my parents the agony of losing two sons within a year. Whatever the reason, I try to live each day as a gift from God - which it truly is.
Whenever I hear someone tell me about chest pain - I am like a madman. I won't let them alone until they promise me they will go seek immediate attention.
Please learn from my experience - if you get chest pain, if you feel faint, if you get pain in your arms or your jaw, if you feel a hard to describe sense of unease - don't do what I did, don't take any chances. Go directly to the nearest emergency room and seek help. It may save your life. You may not be as lucky or as blessed as I was.
I wish I had a nickel for every patient who drove himself/herself to the hospital when they experienced the symptoms you have described. I'd be living on my own private island in French Polynesia right now.
Note to all and sundry: if you are having chest pain, nausea, sweating, weakness, palpitations, or shortness of breath- or any combination of one or more of those symptoms- CALL 911. DO NOT DRIVE YOURSELF TO THE HOSPITAL.
This may seem silly to someone who only lives five or ten minutes away from a hospital. But if you have those symptoms, it indicates that your heart is already being starved of oxygen (Myocardial Ischemia). If your heart is ischemic, you may be only seconds away from that heart muscle actually dying (Myocardial Infarct).
Not minutes, people; seconds. All it takes to convert your chest pain from ischemia to infarct is a shift of that clot by a distance that could fit easily on the head of a pin.
If that happens while you are driving yourself to the ER, you will not only be hurting yourself. You will also harm anyone standing in the path of your vehicle as you lose control. It's happened. I encountered such a person on one of my days off when he rear-ended me at an intersection. I got out to give him a piece of my mind and ended up performing CPR. On my day off. Don't drive yourself!
And don't get a friend or loved one to drive you, either. You may avoid hitting another car when your heart stops, but your friend will be a little distracted by your agonal breathing and will have to live with the guilt forever. Don't do that to your friend or loved one.
Medic units are trained to give care within minutes of the call and to transport you to the ER safely, continuing progressive care for you all the way there. They exist for this reason. USE THEM.
Oh, and two more good reasons to let EMS take you to my ER:
1: The Medic Unit doesn't get caught at red lights;
2: Traffic will get out of the way of the Medic Unit.
So you can travel quickly to the ER while passing the corpses who chose to drive themselves and died on the way.