Anyone here had a heart attack?

Hi, teleadm ! 

Not boring at all, glad you recovered, and that you found a positive outcome from it, beyond merely the recovery. Do you mind if I ask how long ago (and, of course, you needn't answer if you don't care to)?

I've never had one, but have been closer than I care to: my husband has had three; the first in 2008. He awoke one morning complaining of what he thought was only gastric distress, but when he added that he was having pain in his left arm, I insisted we go to the E.R., which is where he had the actual attack. A double bypass was performed the next day, he was home within a week and recovered nicely.

Then, just shy of two years ago, the last day of Feb '16 to be precise and again early in the morning, he'd just been to the bathroom, returned to his chair, gasped once and stopped breathing, becoming completely unresponsive. I was on to 911 immediately, and when the team of EMTs got him laid out on the rug to work on him, the first thing I heard one of them say was, "He's in full arrest."

I can tell you two things: neither CPR nor defib are anything like what are portrayed on TV or in movies. The CPR compression is so vigorous that it cracks the breastbone and the EMTs must rotate every two minutes. Defib, which they administered twice, produces not the dramatic jump that actors perform, but merely the slightest twitch of the legs.

At this point, I wish to say a word about the persistence and heroism of those EMTs, of whom there were over a half-dozen in the room: again, because of movies and TV, I expected at any minute to hear one of them say, "Call it," but they worked tirelessly for a full ten minutes until they re-established a heartbeat, and another ten to get him stabilized for transport to the hospital. There, he spent five days in the cardiac ICU, the first two of which he remained under sedation and a cold-water blanket to reduce brain swelling. It was during this time I was told what the possibilities were: he might not wake up at all; if he did, there was no way to know what his cognitive abilities would be after so much oxygen deprivation; if he awoke and became lucid, he may have lost weeks or even months of recall.

Well, he did awake, and although he now has only the vaguest memory of his ten days in the hospital and none of the five in the ICU, he remembers everything right up to the moment before he went into arrest, and is 100% his old self (who has always been nice). The doctors told me that those making such a full recovery from such an event comprise only 5%.

The third attack was only about a week after he returned home, was minor and due to a collapse of one of the stents that had been inserted, which was replaced immediately after I brought him back to the ER. Since then, he's been fine, and his visit to the cardiologist two weeks ago found everything good, with an echocardiogram displaying undamaged function of the heart muscle.

You already know this, teleadm , but to anyone who's taken the time to read this lengthy post, I'll say this: chest pains are nothing to ignore or fool around with. That first morning back in '08 when I urged a visit to the ER, my husband said, "But what if it's nothing?"

"If it's nothing," I told him, "we'll come back home. But what if it's something, and we don't go?"

No one wants to believe something serious is going on when their bodies are giving them unpleasant signals, but it's not worth the gamble. You don't want to learn the hard way that a life was at stake.

And I trust the EMTs where you live are as heroic as they are where we do. When "another day at the office" involves the absolute refusal to give up that I witnessed, those men and women are, to me, nothing short of superhuman.         
  

Thanks for filling me in, and especially for the remark about difficulty breathing. I should have mentioned that along with chest pains as one of the common warning signs as a reminder to others, and your description of "no air in the air" is vividly expressive. I'm sure anyone can imagine the panic it would induce.