Lessons of Heart Disease, Learned and Ignored
[...] The popular image of a heart attack is all wrong.
It’s the Hollywood heart attack, said Dr. Eric Peterson, a cardiologist and heart disease researcher at Duke University.
“That’s the man clutching his chest, grimacing in pain and going down,” Dr. Peterson said. “That’s what people imagine a heart attack is like. What they don’t imagine is that it’s not so much pain as pressure, a feeling of heaviness, shortness of breath.”
Most patients describe something like Mr. Orr’s symptoms — discomfort in the chest that may, or may not, radiate into the arms or neck, the back, the jaw, or the stomach. Many also have nausea or shortness of breath. Or they break out in a cold sweat, or have a feeling of anxiety or impending doom, or have blue lips or hands or feet, or feel a sudden exhaustion.
And:
Mr. Orr said he did not like to think of himself as someone who had to take a fistful of pills every day. Even the recommended daily aspirin seemed superfluous, he thought.
“I think I sort of pooh-poohed the notion that one tablet of aspirin each day would do anything,” Mr. Orr said.
And:
Now Mr. Orr plans to be serious about taking his medication and getting back to his diet and exercise program. He will call an ambulance if he ever has symptoms again. Still, he hates to think of himself as a patient. “I’m a little freaked out that I will have to take medication for the foreseeable eternity,” Mr. Orr said.
But the day after he got home from the hospital, he thought about what had happened.
“The gravity of the situation just sort of clicked,” Mr. Orr said. “I started to cry.”
Crybaby eejit.
