If you experience these symptoms, do not ignore them.
July 15, 2024 2:03 PM(Updated 14:04 hours)
I am writing this from a bed in the coronary care unit of a major hospital in west London. I have woken up feeling restless, but without pain or tightness in my chest. It is an astonishing result.
On Saturday I underwent a three-hour operation in which talented and professional doctors at Hammersmith Hospital inserted not one, not two, but three stents into and around my increasingly fragile heart. Although it is surprisingly difficult to be more precise, at some point during the previous two weeks I had suffered a heart attack – my second. The first was nine years ago.
I write about this in the hope that if just one man (the symptoms are a little different for women) recognizes some of the symptoms before I did, acts on them, and maybe even saves his own life, then maybe – just maybe – I will have turned one of the scariest days of my life into a positive and meaningful lesson for at least one family. Because, in the case of a heart attack, the sooner we act, the better. I wish I had followed my own advice.
Nine years ago, I had completely ignored the symptoms: the crushing chest pains that left me doubled over in front of the bathroom mirror, the strange sensation that all my blood was circulating in the wrong direction, the sweats, the chills, the shortness of breath, and the absolute, telltale pain in my left arm that would occur around midnight.
I then drove my daughters to their nonna’s house for Sunday lunch and back, before attempting to go to work on Monday morning, when the simple act of bending over to tie my shoelaces left me breathless and out of breath.
This time, there were a couple of times when I felt an almost literal tightness in my chest and pain that made me gasp for air. Like many men do, I ignored the obvious (that it was probably a heart attack) and preferred to tell myself it was just indigestion.
However, I found it harder to ignore the ten-minute walks that left me sidetracked, the terrible gag reflexes, and the sporadic return of milder chest pains. The general feeling of lethargy could not be explained by the stress of the end-of-term madness that prevails in all schools.
So, off I went to my GP, armed with a carry-on bag and full expectation of what would happen: a referral to my local emergency room, a blue-light transfer to this specialist heart hospital, and my three-hour encounter with the genius of Dr Henry Spiegelman and his team as they fixed my heart through my wrist, while I watched under local anaesthetic.
My family thanks you, Henry. But to anyone reading this who is experiencing any of the above symptoms, your family will thank you for not being “that guy” and acting a little quicker than I did. It’s not actually indigestion.
