Surviving a Heart Attack

by Martha Ellis Yates

I just turned 50 and, to tell you the truth, I'm kind of surprised I made it. Celebrating this milestone was the last thing on my mind in June 2003 when I had my first heart attack and then my second, within five days of each another.

Indigestion had been bothering me off and on for a few weeks before my heart attacks. I treated it with indigestion medicine my doctor prescribed and, for the most part, the discomfort went away—until the Father's Day dinner at my sister-in law's house. I only made it halfway through dinner before I felt so bad I had to go lie down. I took something for what I thought was indigestion and the pain mostly went away.

Later that night, I woke up in pain again, took more medicine and something for the pain, but never really got back to sleep. At 2 a.m., I woke up my husband and asked him to take me to the emergency room, which was about 30 minutes away. When we arrived, they took me right away to a trauma bed. The doctor told me later that I was completely gray when I walked in the door—and, from her emergency medicine experience, she recognized a heart attack when she saw one.

My blood work confirmed the ER doctor's hunch: it had been a heart attack—which, according to the tests results, probably had happened at dinner earlier that day. When they told us, my husband was the one who went white. I told them that he needed something, not me, and they took him out of my room to talk with him. After they stabilized me, I was flown to a larger hospital's cardiac care unit for angioplasty, where they opened up a blockage in an artery behind my heart. I came home two days later.

I'm the classic case of not having normal heart attack symptoms—like so many women who have heart attacks. I even had a good primary care physician—and he missed my symptoms. I live and work on a 48-acre farm, so I get plenty of daily exercise from early February to after Halloween planting and harvesting wildflowers and vegetables for local farmers' markets. I eat healthy food—farm-raised food. There isn't even any history of heart disease in my immediate family—in my parents, my three athletic brothers, my sister, or my huge extended family of 10 aunts and uncles and 20 cousins. I don't drink alcohol but I used to smoke—about a pack a day—before the heart attacks. Heart disease was the furthest thing from my mind.