At around 5:45p.m local time on Friday, I noticed that my left elbow was beginning to feel weird, a feeling like I had hit my funnybone recently and was getting an echo of the pain, dull, insistent, off-and-on, then constant but not too painful, dull. I was chatting on line with a friend in Montreal. I noticed in a minute or two that my chest was feeling "tight."
Everyone knows that "tight" feelings in the chest are a sign of cardiac trouble, so I begged out of the chat and stood up from this computer and walked around. As soon as I did the "tightness", which I could hardly call even a dull ache, much less a pain, became more pronounced ... but still well short of pain. Then I began to sweat ... profusely.
I felt a little weak and lay down on the couch with a half dozen thoughts swimming through my head. Was this a heart attack, I wondered. I thought not and continued to lie there, but then thoughts of my daughter and how much we mean to each other kept rising to the surface, so I walked a little unsteadily into the kitchen and chewed down a 81mg aspirin, thinking that it would do no harm and might help if this were the on-set of a heart attack. Still, I was surprised at the lack of stabbing pains or any other of the Hollywood signs of heart attack. I went to my bedroom and lay down, hoping the whole thing would go away. By now it was nearly 6:10pm Friday.
Five minutes later I decided that things were worse so I pulled my cellphone from my khaki shorts and punched out 911.
It took a good ten minutes, perhaps fifteen for them to arrive, and in short order I was speeding down the neighborhood streets, lights and siren, to the local hospital. By the way, the 911 operator told me to take three more 81mg aspirins. So by the time the paramedics had arrived I had consumed the equivalent of one normal sized aspirin. That could have saved my life. If there was an other significant key, it was that we set a new land speed record down Oracle Road to the hospital.
By 7:00pm I was in the ER, lines and tubes were everywhere, and they had inserted a stent device up my femeral artery into the right coronary artery, unblocking the flow of blood to the lower parts of the heart muscle. Seventy minutes had elapsed, and subsequently, the medical personnel said that 80 minutes might have been too many.
I spent 36 hours in the ICU immobilized because of the catheter inserted in my groin. I felt good, but was extremely uncomfortable in the hospital bed which sacrificed comfort for fexible positions. Still, I was alive and now I am home with my daughter, writing to anyone who will read, that DENIAL is the worst enemy you have.
Yes, a lifetime of juicy burgers and fries, of ice cream, of steak and eggs, of a thousand dietary excesses and, of course, some crappy genes behind it all, are all to blame. But I was lucky in that I overcame the DENIAL in time to save my own life. Angina is rarely a false positive. Tightness in the chest need not be actually painful to be a clear sign of cardial distress. Profuse sweating with these other two symptoms is extremely unlikely to be anything else but the crucial and perhaps final clue that you are having a deadly heart attack.
I was both lucky and smart. I saved my life with the early aspirin and with the call to 911. But I nearly did not. The DENIAL that you are having a heart attack is your most deadly enemy. It very nearly killed me.
