Listen to your body’s distress
Heart attack victim warns not to ignore the signs
HEART attack survivor Nicole Ward is warning middle-aged women to listen to their bodies after she wrongly attributed terrible pain and sweats to a coughing fit she had after a curry she ate at work.
Coincidentally, the 51year-old works in the cardiac catheter suite at Gold Coast University Hospital, arguably the best place in the world to have a life-threatening incident.
“Had I been at home I probably would have dismissed the symptoms as just being perhaps a strained muscle from all the coughing,” said the 51-year-old from Mermaid Waters. “The scary thing is, I probably wouldn’t have called an ambulance and perhaps had a lie down and not woken up again.”
After lunch, and trying to ignore the heavy pain radiating down the middle of her chest, she headed back to the ward to continue her shift.
“I started becoming quite clammy and warm but at that stage I was still thinking it was from the curry I’d been eating,” she said. “At that point the nurses came in to have their lunch and they immediately recognised I wasn’t looking good. I told them I was fine and heading back to work after a small sit down.
“But I started feeling pretty unwell and felt really sick all over. The pain was starting to radiate under my ribcage and down my arm. That’s when the girls said ‘that’s it, you’re going for an ECG’.”
While an initial ECG on the ward didn’t show any signs of a heart attack, her pain raised the suspicions of the team, and the catheter lab nurse unit manager Vanessa Beattie sent Ms Ward to the emergency department (ED).
“The team here are amazing and we have a number of years between us in the specialty of cardiology,” said Ms Beattie. “I think we recognise the symptoms relatively quickly if something’s not quite right and needs further investigation.”
Ms Ward said by the time she got to ED it felt like “an elephant was sitting on my chest. I was very short of breath and I became quite limp”.
Cardiac catheter suite director Dr Ravie Batra said what started out as any other day became quite extraordinary for the cath lab family.
“At round 7pm I got a phone call from our advanced trainee and we immediately activated the cath lab, which is a 24/7 service we provide for patients having a heart attack,” Dr Batra said. “We did an angiogram which showed one of Nicole’s arteries was blocked and we confirmed one area of her heart was not moving because of the blocked artery.”
While there is history of heart disease on her father’s side, Ms Ward said doctors believed stress was a contributing factor to her heart attack.