Dying of embarrassment
This habit could end up killing us
LAST Thursday evening I was lying in bed when I started to feel ... unwell.
It was not anything too dramatic, just a bit dizzy, a little bit sick and my heartbeat was racing.
I’d been feeling fine all day so I wasn’t expecting the sudden onset of weird symptoms.
I’m probably tired from a big week at work I thought.
But within minutes the dizziness had gotten worse, the room seemed to be spinning around me.
Maybe I didn’t eat enough I thought.
My partner was watching television upstairs.
As sweat began pouring down my face and neck and my ears started ringing, I realised I might be in trouble.
These aren’t good symptoms, I thought as a wave of nausea hit me. In fact, I know these are bad symptoms, but are they bad enough to cause a fuss?
I was lying there, cold and clammy, not moving, not reacting as I began to feel worse and worse, just hoping that there would be some magic sign that would tell me “now is the point you need to act”.
I just needed something to tell me that I wasn’t being a hypochondriac or overreacting.
Finally, it struck me: people probably die due to inaction. I’m lying here silently while help is just up the stairs because I don’t want to be embarrassed.
I got up, made it upstairs and promptly fainted, which was a good motivator for my partner to call an ambulance.
Luckily for me, the diagnosis was just a nasty virus but the symptoms I experienced should not have been ignored and getting checked out was the right thing to do.
The paramedics gave me aspirin as a precaution and the hospital kept me in to rule out a heart attack or similar problem and guess what?
No one was rude about it and no one told me I was being melodramatic.
In the end, it all worked out fine, but it made me think.
Are women dying of embarrassment?
The short answer is, yes, we are.
Every hour, an Australian woman dies of heart disease.
Heart disease kills more women each year in Australia than all the cancers combined but for some reason we are far more likely to be alert and aware of things like breast lumps and mammograms, than we are about our heart health.
A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that women display an ‘optimism bias’ about their health.
They believe that they are less at risk of health problems than they really are, which may be keeping them from getting checked out when they need to.
Young women, in particular, have been found to blame heart attack symptoms on external factors such as work and family stress and females are apparently more likely to call a friend than an ambulance when they’re feeling unwell.
We also suffer from a misconception that a heart attack will look like it does in the movies, with dramatic chest clutching and lightning bolts of pain. We don’t realise that something as simple as chest tightness, heartburn and a sore jaw can be warning signs.
We’re the caregivers, we’re the pillars that hold up our households and we’re quick to look after our loved ones, but not quick enough at looking after ourselves.
Professor Gordian Fulde from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine said any unusual cardiac symptoms need to be checked out, whether that’s by your GP or at an emergency department out of hours or in the case that you need urgent attention. And no one is going to be angry at you
for doing so.
“That’s the whole idea of the emergency department,” he said.
“You go there and they have a triage person that you talk to who is really highly skilled.
“Anything that’s in the chest, we worry about.
“It’s really important that when a female, who otherwise thinks she should be healthy, has a symptom that is on its own troubling, like dizziness, breathlessness, chest discomfort.
“All sorts of things that really aren’t right, she needs to go and seek medical help.”
For more information, visit www.kidspot.com.au.