Heart Attack ?

Wishing you all the best for a full and speedy recovery.

I have a stent, fitted within 2 hours of the symptoms, it’s a doddle. They push it up on a wire via your wrist, mine got stuck at my shoulder so they went in via the groin. You don’t feel a thing until the stent does it’s stuff which can be disconcerting at first, like the blood returning to a dead leg.

They’ll put you on the big 4 – aspirin (blood thinning), bisoprolol (blood pressure), ramipril (ACE inhibitor) and a statin (cholesterol). For 12 months there will be a pill that helps the stent and a nitroglycerin spray for under the tongue if you get any bad chest pain (then dial 999).

After care is marvelous, but be prepared to have to explicitly tell people that when you say you have a bad chest because of a cold or flu, it’s not that pain in the chest. You now know what that feels like and you will know it again.

So good luck, I hope it goes well but it’s not so much bad news as it was years ago. It will be life changing but in a good way as you chuck out the bad habits. If you are a smoker this is your time to pack it in.

Blimey – that sounds rough – all the best for a full and quick recovery.

All the very best Graham, as Dave says stents are a relatively safe and painless fix, but I read that by-pass surgery is coming back in vogue as a better long term fix.

Apart from having a positive attitude, the most important bit is to get on any follow-up physiotherapy courses your Health area runs. They seem to be a fairly standard post-op procedure in many authorities, and not only give diet advice, they also give you a chance to try out modern gym equipment and enable you to find what suits. Instead of spending £250+/year on gym subs I figured I had enough self discipline and bought a recumbent exercise bike which I have now used for 30-40 minutes each evening for the last 14 years. (Would have preferred a Cross Trainer but it disagreed with my hernia!). The modern bikes can often be linked with an Android/Apple pad and give you both feedback and incentives to safely raise your heart rate – pretty much what a personal trainer would do.

Although as Dave says, you will know what a big-un feels like, I still have difficulty with discriminating between a chronic indigestion caused by GERD and the lead-in to a major heart attack – hence my over usage of nitro spray as a testing agent.

I discussed this issue with my GP and to my surprise she recommended either I get one of the newer Apple Watches that have EKG monitoring or a stand-alone Android add-on such as Kardia (there are others such as the Withings watch). Apparently the group practice had been running some unofficial tests on whether such monitoring caught heart attacks/strokes at an early enough stage to be useful. While it did not catch all such problems they felt that despite the false positives/negatives it was still useful enough to pass on the information to anyone who specifically asked. (I guess they would have had problems with the GMC if they just gave out local test info without being asked).

[edit] btw the Kardia instructions are a bit pants. It is important to position the ‘arrow’ on the Kardia close to the microphone opening on the phone. If you do not do this it will just show a poor signal when being used.

All the best, Graham. Wishing you luck with your recovery. It’s sh1tty being in hospital over the Christmas period, it happened to me when I adversely reacted to the first dose of anti-body treatment. Being there for Christmas is rough for you and worse for the family.

Hope you’re getting all the support you need – it sounds that way – and are on the mend soon.🙏🙏

I recall last Christmas and being in Grimsby hospital right up to Christmas Eve. What I didn’t need was the gathering tension as I waited for Pharmaceuticals to get up to the Ward with all the meds I would need to take back with me. By 1530 the Physio’s, nurses, surgeon and doctors had all done their bit and I was officially discharged, but the Pharma people were dragging their feet. In the end a staff Nurse went down there herself and bullied them into giving her the stuff. Phoned my son to come up and drive me home, got back at (IIRC) 0930-ish. But I could see the on duty staff were getting the place ready for those staying. I knew that I would have had good care and good food, had I been forced to stay in, the staff were great and the food had been invariably good.

But being in over the holiday is definitely krappy: my sympathies Graham. Get well and get home soon young man!

Maybe they want to rule out any possibility of indigestion??? I hear the symptoms are similar???

Joking aside – let them do what they do best, go with the flow, but ensure there is someone capable monitoring their process and progress.  They normally do very well, but can be lacking if left unattended!! Silly things like misplaced records can play havoc with a tight timescale.

Best of luck with the angiogram tomorrow. I know when they do a dye highlighted CT scan, they don’t like me eating for a good few hours prior. Plenty of water and a full bladder, yes, full stomach, no!!:(

They may give you an anaesthetic drip in the arm just in case they need to pass the probe through your heart. Nothing to be concerned about as the team has done it many times before. However anaesthetic and food are rarely a good mixture hence nil by mouth.

Instead I spent what seemed a lot of time watching the young technician/surgeon who’s job was ‘flying’ the probe around my arteries by looking at two screens (xy + xz I think) and mentally translating their two outputs into 3D. I asked him if he was good at computer games and he said it helped!

It has all probably moved on a bit in 14 years as I thought it pretty crude graphics technology even for that time.