by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
As I’ve noted here previously, there were a number of very good reasons that I believed that Emergency Department physician who sent me home with an acid reflux misdiagnosis. Despite my textbook heart attack symptoms of central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain down my left arm, these reasons included:
1. He had the letters M.D. after his name;
2. He misdiagnosed me in a decisively authoritative manner;
3. I wanted to believe him because I’d much rather have indigestion than heart disease, thank you very much;
4. The Emergency nurse scolded me privately about my questions to this doctor, warning me: “He is a very good doctor, and he does not like to be questioned!” (The questions I’d been asking included, not surprisingly: “But Doctor, what about this pain down my left arm?”);
5. Most of all, what I had always imagined a heart attack looking like (clutching one’s chest in agony, falling down unconscious, 911, ambulance, sirens, CPR) was not at all what I was experiencing. Instead, despite my alarming symptoms, I was still able to walk, talk, think and generally behave like a normally functioning person, i.e. one who is definitely NOT having a heart attack!*
So it all made sense to me as I was being sent home from Emergency that day, feeling very embarrassed because I had clearly been making a big fuss over nothing.
My experience, however, might have been what researchers in Ireland refer to as “slow-onset myocardial infarction”. Continue reading “Slow-onset heart attack: the trickster that fools us”
If you thought you were having a heart attack, would part of you worry about being embarrassed if it turned out your symptoms weren’t that serious after all? Would you dread the attention of an ambulance coming to your home? If so, you might be considered a 
Heart Sisters 