A woman sat on her couch watching Lanterns when her chest started hurting. Her first thought was indigestion.
She shifted positions, paced her home, and grabbed an ice pack when she started sweating. By the time she ended up on the floor, she was wondering why she was having a panic attack.
“I’m not even prone to panic attacks,” she wrote afterward on Threads, posting as @grrr_em_lin.
She took a hit from her asthma inhaler. It didn’t help. Then she remembered something she’d seen years ago.
In 2011, the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women campaign released a short film titled Just a Little Heart Attack. Directed by and starring Elizabeth Banks, it follows a mother getting her kids out the door while having a heart attack that she keeps explaining away as gas. The point was that women’s cardiac symptoms often don’t look like what people expect, and that women talk themselves out of getting help.
So she called 911, and then called her ex to come stay with her kids.
“I was pretty sure I was having a heart attack,” she wrote.
The paramedics put her on an EKG, ran two IV lines, and stuck defibrillator pads on her back.
“They asked a LOT of questions,” she wrote. “I was barely coherent, barely conscious from the pain I was in. I was crying loudly.”
In the ambulance, she was embarrassed by the sirens and kept telling the crew it was probably nothing. An EMT took her hand and told her the readouts showed a massive heart attack and that if she hadn’t called when she did, she might not have made it.
At the hospital, doctors found a clot in her left anterior descending artery (LAD), blocked 70% in one spot and 90% in another. The LAD is the one people call the widow-maker.
Surgeons put in two stents. She was awake for it, which is standard for a cardiac catheterization, though the pain management didn’t work well for her. She wrote that this was “likely due to my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome,” a connective tissue disorder documented to interfere with local anesthetics.
“I whimpered through the whole thing,” she posted from the cardiac ICU.
