Having since undergone open-heart surgery, Schaffer says he's conscientious about lowering his blood pressure - checking it regularly at home and diligently keeping up with the new medications his doctor has prescribed. When the paramedics arrived, they hooked him up to an EKG machine and said, “Hey, Bill, you're having a heart attack. “I wanted to go outside to wait for the EMT so they didn't have to come up the stairs, but I was in so much pain I had to lay on the floor.” Schaffer's cousin helped him down the stairs. But still he didn't want to appear ill to his colleagues who might respond. “My eating patterns were horrible."Īfter Schaffer realized what was happening that summer night, he asked his wife to dial 911. He barely had time to eat, so lunch meant something quick and unhealthy – a hamburger or chicken nuggets. “I had an extraordinarily stressful job,” Schaffer says. In his town, a western suburb of New York, he'd responded to terror attacks, mass shootings, and the Sandy, Floyd and Irene hurricanes. As director of the EMT department, he was on call all day every day, often under some horrific circumstances. “I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.”īut Schaffer's numbers didn't tell the whole story. Schaffer was religious about his every-six-month checkup with his cardiologist, and taking his meds. Still, neither he nor his doctor were alarmed. "That's when I put the game together and knew I was having a heart attack.”Įven on blood pressure medication, Schaffer had high blood pressure - not “horrible” like he had seen in some of the people whose lives he saved (or didn't), but higher than normal. “It traveled to my shoulder and arms, and radiated to my jaw. No longer did his heart feel like it was being squeezed - now it was being crushed. “The pain was starting to build,” he says. Still, he wasn't concerned, and retired to the couch for a chat with his cousin. Then, during the meal he felt some indigestion. “I started feeling a little funny prior to eating,” Schaffer recalls - sweaty without sweating, feverish without a fever. They spent the day together, and then had dinner. And every day the pain in his back intensified whenever he climbed the stairs. But when he started experiencing the same sensations, he told his wife he needed to make an appointment to see the chiropractor. He knew the symptoms, what they looked like, what his patients told him they felt like. He witnessed people who had heart attacks nearly every day. The feeling that two fingers were squeezing the life out of his heart with every beat. The stabbing pain in the center of his back whenever he walked up or down stairs. Here, five heart attack survivors share their very different experiences - and what they wish they'd realized sooner.īill Schaffer realizes he should have known better. Sometimes it's just a little discomfort, or an ache.”įor the simplest takeaway, Wood says, think of any symptoms you feel this way: “If you have to google ‘chest pain’ or ‘chest discomfort,’ then probably you first need to call 911.” “The one uniform thing people say is the symptom that they had was very different from what they had felt previously. “The way to know is if you experience something you haven't felt before.” For those who've had heart problems previously, the advice often still applies. “Basically if you feel something in your back, chest, jaw or tooth that you haven't felt before, get it checked out,” she says. Wood admits that the medical literature describing telltale symptoms can contradict itself, and says the combination of misinformation and downright denial complicates matters. “So when people don't have that classic symptom that they've seen or heard about, they think, ‘Well, this must be something else.'" “People have this idea of the Hollywood heart attack, which is a man squeezing his chest, the feeling of the balloon about to burst,” says clinical cardiologist Malissa Wood, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Thing is, more than half of the people who have a heart attack don't recognize its symptoms. En español | More than 1 million Americans will suffer from a heart attack this year, and about 150,000 of them will die from it, according to the American Heart Association.
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