One of the reasons it can be difficult to spot a heart attack is because while some of the most common symptoms are well known, other early signs can vary and be easy to dismiss.
TikToker user Nikki (@martyandnikki) was generally healthy when she had a heart attack at only 46. In a candid video, she shared some of the symptoms that she wrote off as things like indigestion and perimenopause.
“Two days ago I had a heart attack,” she said. “I have no previous medical conditions. I have never taken a Covid vaccine and I had some warnings approximately a week before.”
It all began when she woke up one morning to find that her left shoulder was feeling a little sore — almost like she’d been “sleeping on it wrong” — which she “chalked up to possibly being a ‘frozen shoulder’ from perimenopause.”
The day before her heart attack — shoulder still sore — she awoke feeling like she was going to vomit, but the nausea passed only 15 minutes later, so she didn’t dwell on it.
The day of her heart attack, the same symptoms persisted, but now she also felt a tightness in her chest — “like someone was squeezing it,” and the pain in her shoulder began to travel down her arm.
She took a hot shower — which can help with chest pain by relaxing your muscles and increasing blood flow to the area — and immediately felt better.
Nikki happened to have a doctor’s appointment that morning for unrelated reasons, so she explained her symptoms to him fully expecting to possibly need to go into the ER — and he deemed it unnecessary.
While he did tell her to go to the ER if the symptoms recurred, “he didn’t feel like [she] should go to the emergency room right then because [she] wasn’t experiencing any symptoms and they probably weren’t going to be able to see what was going on,” she said.
Shortly after lunch, the symptoms returned — and they were worse.
“The arm pain was radiating all the way down, my chest felt like it was being squeezed as tight as you could squeeze it [and] I started to feel sick again,” she said.
Nikki got into her car to drive to the hospital, which is when she also began to experience “extreme sweating,” and the pain in her left arm felt “numbing.”
Thankfully, once she was in the ER, she was seen almost immediately by a male nurse — whom she credits with saving her life. He confirmed she was having a heart attack and rushed through the procedure that put her on the mend.
Her video received over 400,000 likes, with many commenters thanking her for sharing her story while also expressing shock that the doctor didn’t immediately do an EKG.
Some noted that it seemed doctors were often too quick to dismiss a heart attack as anxiety — especially when the patient is a woman.
Others pointed out that some of the symptoms really can be easy to overlook, with one user writing, “I don’t think people understand how NORMAL you can look & act while having a heart attack. My husband looked so normal when we went to the ER I was doubtful and was an experienced RN.”
Some of the most common and well known symptoms of a heart attack include chest pain and pain in the left shoulder that travels down your arm — but there are other atypical warning signs.
Dr. Guruprasad “Guru” Srinivas, director of Cardiac Rehab at Northwell Staten Island University Hospital, previously told The Post that people with diabetes and women were especially prone to some less common symptoms.
According to Srinivas, those symptoms can include a toothache, stomach pain and nausea, fatigue, profuse sweating and — most worryingly — nothing at all.
“In many cases, patients will not have any symptoms at all but will present with a silent heart attack,” he said.
Srinivas noted that making healthy lifestyle choices — such as exercising, not smoking, and avoiding sugar — “can go a long way in helping prevent the development of heart disease, as can periodic cardiovascular risk assessments with health care professionals.”
While fewer older people are having heart attacks, they have been on the rise for women between 35 and 54.
