My chest filled to explode

Apo­lo­gies to David McComb. For those who do not fol­low my twit­ter feed, I will tell you what happened over the past few days.

I was rid­ing to work on Fri­day morn­ing, when I star­ted hav­ing a pain in the chest. Mild pain which I have been get­ting recently when I push myself on the bike, but because it is accom­pan­ied by a bout of nausea, I always put it down as stom­ach related. Instead it was angina and last Fri­day morn­ing it did not go away in a couple of minutes after eas­ing the pace.

So I stopped at the nearest train sta­tion intend­ing to catch the next train to work. How­ever, the pain did not go away while wait­ing for the next train and the nausea got worse. So instead I caught the next train home. About 10 minutes into the trip, I real­ised I was hav­ing a heart attack, my chest pains where much stronger, it felt like my lungs where being crushed. I was hav­ing trouble breath­ing and I was los­ing sen­sa­tion in my left arm.

I rolled my bike out of the sta­tion and got home quickly, dropped the bike off, announced to Angie I was prob­ably hav­ing a heart attack and walked across the road to the ambu­lance depot to get help.

I was then rushed to Fre­mantle hos­pital, while being told I should of called the ambu­lance from the train and they would of come and met me and saved 10 minutes, which could of made a big difference.

The reason I was being rushed to Fre­mantle hos­pital instead of Rock­ing­ham hos­pital which was closer, was Fre­mantle has a spe­cial­ist coron­ary care unit, which I got to see at close hand. I was in the Fre­mantle emer­gency depart­ment for a little over 10 minutes, as the pre­pared me for sur­gery. Then I was in sur­gery, get­ting a block­age in an artery which sup­plies blood to the heart cleared and mak­ing sure it stayed open by insert­ing in a steel tube.

Because the oper­a­tion was only done under local anaes­thetic and a big dose of morphine, once I was in post op and I loc­ated my phone, I was tweet­ing about it a little over two hours after I real­ised I was hav­ing an heart attack.

48 hours after the oper­a­tion, I was out of hos­pital, with no per­man­ent dam­age to my heart. My life­style is about to change, I need to take drugs to reduce the thick­ness of my blood, my blood pres­sure, heart rate and cho­les­terol every day for the rest of my life (even though only my cho­les­terol was above aver­age). Lose a few kilos and eat less bad cho­les­terol ( reduce my intake of cheese, eggs, chocol­ate and fried noodles, because I eat little dairy or milk).

So a big thank you to every­body at the Kwin­ana ambu­lance depot, the Fre­mantle Hos­pital Emer­gency Depart­ment and Coron­ary Care Unit, without you I prob­ably would not be alive right now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Personal . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.