Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

"I’d now had been experiencing a heart attack for about a week."

Holy cow. I didn't realize this was possible. This is a good lesson to all of us not to ignore weird, painful phenomena in our body.

View on HN

It's very possible. In EMS I meet folks that have been in having a heart attack for quite some time, it's not always dropping down like a rag doll you see on TV (though many times it is).

My dad did the same thing, one day he had some chest pain that he thought was related to something he ate. Drove a semi truck around for about 6 hours, decided to come home early. He came back to the shop, parked his truck and called my mom and said he had indigestion like he'd never experienced, and they went to the doctor. Turned out to be a full-on heart attack he'd been feeling the last 8 hours.

I guess that's a long way of saying listen to your body. Generally, it's trying to tell you something, and if feels just a little off, get checked out. Could definitely save your life.

I'm assuming you mean people can be having an MI, or experiencing angina for quite some time, not actually in cardiac arrest

Yes, I edited it for clarity, because by definition cardiac arrest is the sudden stop of blood flow, where MI/AMI/Angina are more gradual. All are commonly called "heart attacks" but are quite different. Thanks for keeping me honest here.

A lot of people equate a heart attack with cardiac arrest, where the heart actually stops pumping blood and the patient suddenly collapses, but in reality, a heart attack refers to a complete blockage of blood flow to part of the heart, and is sometimes colloquially to refer to inadequate blood flow (the term is never really used clinically).

Also, heart attacks can present very differently in different people. A large number of people (especially women) have atypical presentations that may not include the classic sub-sternal chest pain, so the symptoms often get ignored or missed.

I had a heart attack two years ago. I spent a few weeks with some weird pain in my forearms (both of them) before realizing it was a heart attack. Never felt any pain in my chest.

How did you realize it was a heart attack? Did you go to the doctor and have them check it out?

At first I looked for information on the Internet about the pain in my arms an saw that, among many other things, it could be a heart problem.

A couple of weeks later I started feeling pain on the left side of my jaw (much like a toothache) at the same time I felt the pain in my forearms. Searching again on the Internet I saw that now it was quite probably a heart problem.

About 48 hours after that, the pain in my arms wasn't letting me concentrate on anything (it wasn't stronger, but it felt different, it made me feel that something was really wrong with my body), that's when I went to the emergency room at the hospital.

My wife asks if you are male or female? (I understand if you'd rather not say.We have read that female often have this type of gradual heart attack - my mother-in-law being one)

I am male.

It's also common for people to have a major heart attack without receiving medical attention at all, and only discover it much later when being analyzed by a doctor who notices the damage.

My Grandad drove himself to the hospital the second time he had a heart attack. He decided it was faster than waiting for an ambulance. His wife can't drive b/c she's legally blind now.

Reduced function is a lot more common than heart attacks. Coronary artery disease and such. A heart attack is when it gets bad enough that the heart is damaged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com