Heart attacks are weird.

                                 How to have heart attacks for 2 years without being diagnosed
                                                    by /u/biggusmickus

I'm happy to tell folks what happened to me in the 2 years prior to my untimely death (I got better)... Knowledge is power. If someone hears my story, gets checked & gets cured before it's too late, it's totally worth it.

So anyway... I was a motorbike mechanic. It's 2014, and 2 of the 4 mechanics were off sick right in the hottest part of summer when we're busiest (because motorcyclists are faggots who fear rain) so the 2 of us left are doing double work, and not getting any breaks. We'd had a delivery of a dozen new bikes in crates on top of the day's work, so we were building them & sticking them in the showroom. They were new, no batteries or fuel, so we had to push them to the showroom... Which involved pushing them round the block a total distance of about a quarter mile. Wearing overalls. On a very hot day. On my 6th bike in a row, I got sudden very sharp stabbing pains in my lower left chest, which then shot up into my left arm, down my arm between bicep & tricep (deep inside) and to the fingers of my left hand. Pinky, ring & middle fingers went all numb & tingly. My breathing suddenly jumped out of my control & I start hyperventilating, then the sweating started, like someone poured a mug of warm tea over my head. Then the sickness, I got super dizzy & light headed, vision started whiting out like I was feinting & I thought I was gonna puke. I also got very weak & shaky feeling, and weak knees like I was gonna collapse. All these symptoms happened within about a 5 second period. Naturally, I continued to push the bike round, parked it in the showroom & returned to my toolbox for a swig of water, thinking I'd dehydrated myself. The symptoms were all still there as I was drinking, and my boss walked past saying "Are you OK?" to which I replied "I think I'm dying..." so he laughed & left. A couple of minutes of standing still, leaning on my toolbox & drinking water made the symptoms all go away, so naturally I was fine, and grabbed another bike to push round. Exact same thing happened. I only had a couple of hours of work left, so I repeated the "treatment" and carried on until home time. Sweating, gasping & hurting the whole time. I drive home, and call 111 (the medical non-emergency line in the UK) as calling 999 for not-an-emergency is illegal here. I describe what happened and 4 minutes later there's an ambulance outside. Paramedics come in, ECG me & are not convinced by the results. 2 of the 3 ECGs they did were fine, one was "a bit shaky" but they weren't sure if that was due to a poor contact because chest hair & sweat, so they bundle me in the ambloomance and off to hospital I go. I get more ECGs on the big machine, I get chest X-rays, I get blood taken for tests, I'm there being poked at until 3am when I get to go home. Nothing showed up in ECGs or Xray, and I have to wait for blood results at my GP. Apparently there's a certain protein that only happens when the heart gets damaged, and that's what the blood tests look for. No protein in my test, so I'm all-cleared & told I've probably damaged a muscle right next to the heart, causing the symptoms but there's nothing wrong with the ticker. From this point on, the chest & arm pains continue regularly but I assume it's just an injury and carry on as normal.

I'll pause here to talk about the chest pains, as it's quite important... My chest pains were wrong. I'll mention I'm a big tough guy, used to do hardcore pro wrestling & I'm the kind of guy who ignores injuries unless they stop me dead... I actually once tried to "walk off" a broken ankle. This is the mindset that almost killed me. My chest pains were very sharp & stabby, I described them to the paramedics as being like someone stabbed a fork into my chest, then levered it upwards like they were trying to pry out a rib. Very small area affected, maybe the size of a thumbprint, very distinct 'in & upwards' motion to the pain. It felt like a cross between a muscle tear & a popped tendon... As sharp & stabby as a muscle tear but without the burning, ripping sensation and as pokey & annoying as a tendon injury. The paramedics and the doctors all told me that wasn't heart attack pain... They said, and I quote "a heart attack is like an immense pressure on your chest. Like a gorilla is standing on you, then another gorilla gets on his back." Not at all what I had, mine was a pokey stabby pain with no pressure at all. that bit's important as it keeps coming up.

Months go by, chest pains on and off as I'm going about my day, which I ignore because "meh. 'tis but a niggle" until one day I wake in the morning (on a day off work) to it happening again... All the symptoms of the first attack, only I was sleeping when it happened. I don't wanna phone am ambulance as I know it's not a heart attack (LOL) and I assume the same will happen again but I'm concerned because I hadn't been exerting myself. Lifting engines, pushing motorbikes about, changing tyres etc, when I got pains doing these things I shrugged it off as it's only an injury, but while sleeping? Something's wrong. So I call my GP - line's busy. The surgery is only a few hundred yards away so I take a walk down. By the time I get there I'm drenched in sweat, ask the receptionist to see a doctor and get "they're all really busy, is it an emergency?" to which I reply "I have chest & left arm pain, I can't control my breathing, I'm sweating like mad & feel like I'm gonna feint. You tell me if it's an emergency" ... "Right, sit down". Doctor calls me in, does blood pressure, has a wee listen, talks through what's happening & my previous hospital visit, then decides to do a more thorough test. She gets a bottle of GTN spray & squirts some under my tongue. She asks if the pain subsides at all, and it does so I tell her. 15 minutes later there's an ambulance outside, EGC, hospital, Xray, blood test, rinse and repeat. Exactly the same, not a heart attack. Problem is this time I got taken to a different hospital, didn't have my phone, wallet or any money on me and I had to walk 4 miles home in the pissing rain...

So, months go by, chest pains become more & more frequent, I also become more & more ill. I'm sleeping more, I have less energy, I can't work at full capacity, I feel weak & shaky all the time, my chest hurts all the time and I start getting really worried. By this time summer '16 is rolling around & we're getting busy again. I ask boss for time off to get it checked out properly, and he refuses, saying I'm not allowed to be off sick until "after june". My work production is dropping, I'm getting weaker & weaker, I get to the point where I'm too weak, tired & sore to undress & dress myself, so I take to sleeping in my boots & overalls as it's the only way I can get to work on time, as I'm sleeping in a lot. At this point my routine is work, go home, get in bed immediately (usually way before 7pm), sleep until 2-3am, get up, eat, pee, back to bed & sleep until it's time to get up for work, repeat. We get halfway through June and by now I'm having mini-heart attacks every few hours. Every time I do something slightly strenuous I get chest pain. Push a bike, chest pain. Climb some stairs, chest pain. Tighten a wheelnut, chest pain. Because my production is down & I've been late a few times from sleeping in my boss now hates me, and instructs me if I take a day off sick I'll be fired. Saturday comes (bike techs work tues-sat) and I'm up in the lockup fetching a bike to work on. I push 2 bikes out & start pushing the one that's my next job when suddenly I can't breathe. I park the bike, steady myself on a bench and try to control the breathing. I can't. Hyperventilating like mad, my legs go weak & I crumple to my knees. I can't get up. I'm trying to get up by pulling up on a worktop, but I don't have the strength to get to my feet. Then I can't stay upright at all & I collapse to the floor. By now I can't feel my hands or legs, I'm hyperventilating like mad, I have pins & needles everywhere, I'm sweating uncontrollably, I'm drooling uncontrollably & it's all I can do to keep breathing & not choke on all the fluids appearing in my mouth & nose. After about 10-15 minutes on the floor like that, someone finally comes looking for me & finds me. Then everyone's around. Someone phones an ambulance, ambulance shows up, does stuff with a mask, gets me breathing OK, takes me into the ambulance, ECG again & I recover. I feel OK, they say the ECG was fine so I spend half an hour or so in the ambulance, then they let me go & I go back to work again. I sleep all day sunday, and go to the doctor on monday. Doctor is worried, and books me for a fasting blood test the following week, a more thorough one to finally get to the bottom of this, after that he wants to book me for a "treadmill test". I go to work tuesday, and as we're pushing all the bikes in at the end of the day, it happens again. I go to wash my hands & try to control the breathing using tricks the paramedics on saturday told me, collapse again. I don't wanna be locked in so I make it up to my feet, manage to leave the building & go sit in my car. The other mechanics find me, realise I'm suffering and forge a plan where one drives me home, the other drives my car & his wife follows in their car to get him home. We get to my house, I exit the car & immediately collapse face first in the dirt. Mechanic A decides I can't be left alone so he takes me to his house to keep an eye on me. By about 9-10pm I'm OK & able to walk unassisted again so he takes me home & makes me promise to phone him if anything happens. I sleep, I go to work the next day & the boss fires me. I go home, call my parents to tell them, so my mum decides to come down the next day as we now have to sell my house as I can no longer pay bills. We spend the rest of the week doing runs to the dump, clearing the house out. Every time I do anything I have to go lie down for 10 minutes because of the pains & the breathing issues. then, that weekend I'm sitting in my computer chair chatting to mother, she's on the sofa, I have my back to the PC & I feel a bit dizzy, everything goes white & I die. After a wee adventure to the other side, I come to on the floor, soaking wet, lying in a pool of blood with no idea what just happened. My mum's on the phone in a panic & I hear her going "It's OK, he's back he's back he's breathing again" then I see an ambulance pull up outside the window. I get up as I'm breathing carpet dust (euw), wipe what I think is sweat from my face only to find it's blood. My mum's still on the phone to 999 giving a running commentary on what I'm doing so I go to the bathroom for a look. I'm totally soaked in sweat, and my face is pouring blood from a big gash on my forehead... Turns out when I died, I nose-dived off my chair, face first into my iron dumbbells which were on the floor. I also have "road rash" on my shoulder & knee. I go back to the living room holding some tissue on the head wound & sit down as the paramedics arrive. ECG - fine, go to get in ambulance with them, take pains & start "attacking" (as I'd taken to calling it in the weeks prior) as I go up the stairs, so they give me a huge-ass aspirin & whisk me to hospital. More ECGs, still no positive results, then I take a full scale attack right there on the trolley. They hook me up again, throw some morphine in my IV, and come back saying "Well, it looks like you've had a heart attack". A phone call is made, I'm asked many questions, I get put in another ambulance & taken to the special hospital where a team is waiting for me, I get an angiogram, they find my main coronary artery has collapsed, they chuck a stent in & here we are now. The real kicker was when the cardiologist guy who did the operation was showing me the before & after pics (to distract me from the 3 nurses mopping up all my blood from the floor) and I asked him "how's that happened, what caused that?"... He explains it's a genetic thing, there's no plaque clogging up any of my other arteries, and it was just that one that had collapsed. He reckoned it's probably been developing since puberty if not before. That's when I realise that all my life I've been getting sharp chest pains from exercise. As a kid/teen I'd assumed it was asthma, and as an adult I assumed I could never improve my cardio in the gym because of the asthma as a kid had damaged my lungs, or I just wasn't training hard enough... Nope, heart condition the whole time.

So, if you have chest pains, get them checked. If you get pain when over exerting, get it checked. Because only one artery was faulty, I only had a small bruise on my heart after it all, so the blood tests were never going to find the problem, neither were the chest Xrays or the ECGs. I was told in no uncertain terms that 10 years ago I'd have been a statistic, they'd never have found it, and because the rapid response surgery team at the other hospital didn't exist yet, I'd have simply died in the emergency room while they were trying to work out the problem.

Moral of the story? Don't walk it off. Harass your doctors. If something's wrong, you'll know it, trust your body. Don't be like me, don't go "OK, it's just an injury" and ignore it for 2 years. Get it checked properly. Before I got too sick/weak to carry on, I'd been going to the gym 5 days a week, lifting mostly (because cardio was too sore) and eating healthy #cleannlean style trying to get in shape for summer. First time I was hospitalised, they kept saying "he's very fit & healthy other than the symptoms" which may be part of why they thought it was an injury. This post was probably way too long, but I encourage anyone who reads this to copypasta it anywhere it might be needed. Send it to your friends if you fear for their heart health. Print it off & show your doctor if you're in my situation. I want people to hear this tale so they can learn that even in 2016, doctors, despite their best efforts & using everything available to them, don't always get it right. They try their best, but they're not wizards.