Today’s Oxygen Deprived Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The most common symptom of a heart attack is, of course, chest pain: a tightness, pressure or squeezing, often described as an “elephant on my chest”, which may be lasting or come and go. This is the heart muscle struggling and dying from oxygen deprivation. Pain can radiate to the jaw, throat, back, belly and arms. Other signs and symptoms include shortness of breath, nausea and cold sweats.
Most victims delay before seeking assistance, waiting an average of 2 to 6 hours. Women are the worst, probably because they are more likely to experience less well-known symptoms, such as breathlessness, back or jaw pain, or nausea, says JoAnn Manson, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Survivors say they just didn’t want to make a fuss; that it felt more like indigestion, tiredness or muscle cramps than a heart attack. Then again, some victims are just in denial.
Delay costs lives. Most people who die from heart attacks do so before reaching hospital. The actual cause of death is often heart arrhythmia – disruption of the normal heart rhythm, in other words. Even small heart attacks can play havoc with the electrical impulses that control heart muscle contraction, effectively stopping it. In about 10 seconds the person loses consciousness, and minutes later they are dead. Patients who make it to hospital quickly fare much better; in the UK and US more than 85 per cent of heart attack patients admitted to hospital survive to 30 days. Hospitals can deploy defibrillators to shock the heart back into rhythm, and clot-busting drugs and artery-clearing surgery.
Culled from: New Scientist
Generously donated by: Aeron
My mother died of a heart attack that she suffered in the end-stages of terminal cancer back in 2003 and she exhibited the typical “female” symptoms. She vomited right before she passed away, thinking that she was just nauseous, but obviously in the midst of a heart attack at that time. Makes me sad just thinking about it…
Stories like that always scare me. I have a family history just full of heart disease and heart attacks, on both sides of the family tree. My father had a mild attack in 1990, at 39! What scares me even now is, he started feeling the chest pain in his truck on his way to work in Baltimore, and immediately sought an emergency room. Thing is, he sought our local ER, which means he turned the truck around and drove the two hours back home! He’s a very lucky man.
Don’t try this at home! (Or on the road.)
Your story points out the importance of learning CPR! And in many public places today, you’ll find easy-to-operate defibrillators (AEDs). The American Red Cross course on CPR now includes practice with AEDs … and the whole class takes just 4 hours of your time. Contact your local Red Cross office, or your local EMS department and ask about the upcoming class schedule. And while you’re at it, take a friend and your significant other to that class with you; the life saved might be yours.
The day you posted this my grandmother went into surgery for a triple bypass after having a heart attack. Her symptoms were the same as your mothers. A crazy coincidence.