If you experience these symptoms, don’t ignore them
July 15, 2024 2:03 PM(Has been updated 2:04pm)
![Young man has heart disease, heart patient, heart disease](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SEI_212942541.jpg?resize=640,360&strip=all&quality=90)
I write this from a bed in the coronary care unit of a large hospital in West London, having woken with a feeling of anxiety but no pain or pressure in my chest, which is a surprising result.
On Saturday I underwent a three hour operation where talented and professional doctors at Hammersmith Hospital inserted not one, not two, but three stents into the outside and inside of my increasingly compromised heart. It’s surprisingly hard to say exactly, but at some point in the last two weeks I suffered my second heart attack; the first was nine years ago.
I write about this in the hope that if just one man (women experience symptoms a little differently) notices some of the symptoms before I do, acts on them, and maybe saves his own life, maybe I might be able to turn the most terrifying few days of my life into a positive and meaningful lesson for at least one family. Because with a heart attack, the sooner you take action, the better. I wish I had followed my own advice.
Nine years ago, I completely ignored my symptoms: a tightness in my chest that would send me crouching in front of the bathroom mirror, the eerie feeling that blood was rushing backwards, the sweating, trembling, shortness of breath and, around midnight, a telltale pain in my left arm.
I then drove my daughters to their grandmother’s house for Sunday lunch and back, and when I tried to go to work Monday morning, the simple act of bending down to tie my shoelaces left me exhausted and out of breath.
This time I literally felt a tightness in my chest and several moments of breathlessness. Like so many men, I chose to ignore the obvious – that this was probably a myocardial infarction (heart attack) – and tell myself it was just indigestion.
But it was getting harder to ignore the staggering that came with a 10-minute walk down the street, the horrific vomiting of bile, the occasional recurring mild chest pains, and the general feeling of sluggishness that couldn’t be explained by the end-of-term stress that permeates every school day.
So I packed my overnight bag and headed to my GP, prepared for what was to come: a referral to the local emergency room, a rush to a specialist cardiac hospital and then a three-hour meeting with the brilliant Dr Henry Spiegelman and his team as they attached my heart to my wrist while I was watched over by local anaesthetic.
Henry, my family is grateful to you. But if you’re reading this and experiencing any of the symptoms above, they’ll be grateful that you’re not “that person” and that you acted a little sooner than I did. This isn’t really indigestion.