I am an ER nurse and this is the best description of this event that I have ever heard.
FEMALE HEART ATTACKS
I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is description is so incredibly visceral that I feel like I have an entire new understanding of what it feels like to be living the symptoms on the inside. Women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have… you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor the we see in movies. Here is the story of one woman’s experience with a heart attack:
"I had a heart attack at about 10:30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might have brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.
A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation–the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.
After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasms), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).
This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening – we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I’m having a heart attack!
I lowered the foot rest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else… but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment.
I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics… I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to un-bolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.
I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the radiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stints to hold open my right coronary artery.
I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.
Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.
1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body, not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up… which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’ visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!
2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an aspirin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER – you are a hazard to others on the road.
Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road.
Do NOT call your doctor – he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.
3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive to tell the tale.“
Reblog, repost, Facebook, tweet, pin, email, morse code, fucking carrier pigeon this to save a life!
I wish I knew who the author was. I’m definitely not the OP, actually think it might be an old chain email or even letter from back in the day. The version I saw floating around Facebook ended with “my cardiologist says mail this to 10 friends, maybe you’ll save one!” And knew this was way too interesting not to pass on.
Female heart attacks are much different, and most people don’t know it!
This is so much more helpful than the fucking lists that basically describe everything that happens during a really nasty panic attack and then tell you to go seek help as if you don’t have an anxiety disorder that does this to you on a regular basis and can afford to go to the emergency room.
Auto-reblog.
Many women have silent heart attacks as well, where there are no symptoms at all until BAM! Then it happens.
My best friend’s dad had a heart attack a couple years ago, and apparently got the “female” symptoms instead of the “male”–indigestion, weakness, jaw pain, but no chest pain or fainting. So that’s a thing that can happen, too.
Also importantly: he’d devoted a lot of effort to keeping in shape, even though he was in his 60s, because he knew heart disease ran in his family. He was 20 years older than his father had been when he got his first heart attack, and about the same age as his father was when he died of his, like, third heart attack. A heart attack was inevitable for him, due to genetics, but he had his first (and thus far only) one fairly late and he survived it with no permanent injury because he was consistent about doing moderate exercise a couple times a week for his whole adult life.
It’s incredible how much women do behind the scenes. I know a realtor who relies strongly on his girlfriend’s charisma, beauty and personality to gain clients.
I’ve just been reading The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, about the Harvard women who supported the bulk of astronomy research there over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of them did receive public and academic credit as well as pay – although the university always resisted making any of them faculty until the 1950s – almost all the male astronomers featured were married to accomplished women in their own right, many of them scientists, and you can bet their husbands weren’t putting them on all their papers.
Which has bled into the modern academic world, where many people are expected to do what was essentially a two-person job (filled by male academic + wife) by themselves, or while married to someone else trying to do the same thing. The lack of acknowledgement of women’s work fucks everybody over.
#people who want a return to the mythical prior era #when women did not work #do not want women to stop working #they want them to stop getting credit and pay for it
This reminds me of how early film history, it was always the male director’s wife who did the editing of the films, because the cutting and connecting of film strips was considered a lot like sewing. Of course, anyone who knows anything about film and editing can tell you it changes how good a movie is very easily.
Don’t believe me? Look at the differences between the famous Jaws as the public’s release of it (insisted upon by the female editor) and spielberg, the male director’s version of it (missing basic suspense methods, shows the phony shark too much, etc). Same goes for almost every tarantino film. Editing makes or breaks a film and even today, you can bet your socks editing “the invisible art” was pioneered and is still pushed by women.
^^^^^^ This is so true! And once film editing began to be recognized as an actual art form, women were shoved out of the editing room so that men could be artistic or whatever.
Also Tarantino referred to his favorite editor as being kind of like his mom or something and I swear to god the more I see of him, the less I like him.
The “female editor” for Jaws was Verna Hellman Fields, who cut many other notable films, including American Graffiti along with Marcia Lucas.
Tarantino’s “favorite editor” was Sally JoAnne Menke who edited all of Tarantino’s films until she died.
Because naming and credit is important, especially when you’re talking about women not getting credit and recognition of their work as named individuals.
If you want to know more about women in early filmmaking (emphasis American) and the sociology of how different roles were divided, gendered, and re-gendered in the first decades, I highly recommend Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar.
There are a number of other books to follow that, but it’s 2am and I’m tired so hit me up later for them.
You know what happens when women type? They EDIT. It is a service they are expected to provide invisibly – not to let a mistake or imperfection show to their husband’s audience, but also not to intrude upon his sense that this is all his ideas and his labor. Wives are the unacknowledged story and script doctors, and often co-authors for so many supposedly male-authored works.
Also, I second Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Mahar was my history prof for three or four courses and she is incredibly knowledgeable and engaging.
Speaking anecdotally, there are a good number of rockstar PhD candidates in my program who are only able to put in the hours that they do because their wives function as personal assistants/editors/housekeepers/chefs while they finish up their degrees. I’m not knocking the folks who choose to do this, but the labor of their silent partner is rarely acknowledged and it’s just assumed that they’re preternaturally talented or dedicated. I’ve rarely (never) seen this dynamic reversed, and I’m in a field with a fairly equitable gender ratio.
And the expectation becomes that women can replicate this supernatural talent because that labor isn’t recognized as instrumental to their success.
“The Wife” by Meg Wolitzer is a good book that fictionalizes this!
This is extremely common for all careers. Women are personal assistants/ secretaries for their male partners. But when a woman has a career / when she’s a student she’s expected to handle all of her academic and professional duties and then also do a double shift at home.
In the literary world, I believe one of the most famous examples to be that of Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Tolstoya, who transcribed all of Tolstoy’s manuscripts, since she was the only person capable of understanding his handwriting.
@theoldwalkingsong, I think you already know all of this, but I’m tagging you nonetheless.
“Diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets.
Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to
lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they
lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible.
“
Fatsplaining at its finest. I don’t give a fuck when someone chooses to not be healthy, but don’t sit there and make bullshit excuses and blame anything other than yourself and your lack of self control. Take responsibility and own up to it, you’re not fooling anyone.
I’m sorry other people’s shapes make you so angry that you pretend science is wrong
Obviously this person must think climate change is wrong and vaccines cause autism
I wonder when exactly it was that Star Trek stopped being perceived as light, fluffy, not-really-legitimate sci fi that ~housewives~ liked and started being seen as serious nerd business that girls had to keep their gross cooties off.
Also when did the Beatles start to be remembered as rock legends rather than a silly boy band teenaged girls liked?
When men decided they liked them.
this is seriously exactly how it happened. Women were actually the first rock and roll ‘critics’ because they would write in to women’s papers and magazines to share and discuss what their kids were listening to when men still thought it was trashy teeny bopper music. once it became a lucrative, mainstream genre men shoved women out of the space. Men also tend to be gatekeepers once they move into formerly female spaces – early trek fandom was incredibly open and inclusive; women would set up fan get togethers in their own houses to discuss the show or invite the actors to visit before conventions became a thing, and then were huge in organizing the first conventions – but now the stereotype of a trekkie is a nerdy white dude who scoffs derisively at casual fans and newbies with his encyclopedic and pedantic knowledge of trek
