I run marathons, never smoke or drink — so why me?
DR Salman uddin, 38, a GP, lives in ilford, with his wife Rumana, 37, also a GP, and their two young children. He says: I HAD never had any signs of heart problems — in fact, I considered myself fit and healthy. I regularly ran — I’ve completed three London marathons — had never smoked and didn’t drink alcohol.
Then, one weekend in July 2020, I went for a 10K run. I hadn’t been running for a few weeks due to the Covid lockdown rules and so I paced myself.
It went smoothly, though I was slightly slower than usual. I figured this was because I hadn’t run in a while.
When I got home, I went upstairs to shower and, as I got undressed, noticed I was sweating profusely. Rumana came in and saw I looked so wet, she thought I’d already showered! Then I developed a pain in my chest, which quickly spread to my neck.
I wondered whether the run had triggered indigestion, so I asked Rumana for a Gaviscon tablet, but she ignored me and called 999.
By this time I was sitting on the floor, pain racking my body. Our baby daughter was on the bed gurgling away; she smiled at me and, for a moment, I was distracted but then the pain hit me in a sudden wave, spreading all down my arm, across my chest and neck.
When the paramedics arrived, they seemed jovial and didn’t mention ‘heart attack’, presumably because I was young and fit. I was able to walk to the ambulance with them, where they hooked me up to an ECG to check my heart activity — and then their faces dropped.
Suddenly I was being blue-lit to Barts Hospital in London.
By now the pain was greater, so they gave me morphine as well as aspirin to thin the blood.
In hospital I was whisked through for an angiogram — a sort of X-ray on the heart and arteries around it — and it confirmed I had a blockage in an artery. I’d experienced a heart attack.
I was shocked, as I’d never had any symptoms, nor did I have any of the obvious risk factors: I was not a smoker, a drinker, nor diabetic, I ran regularly and there was no family history of heart disease. They said it was ‘one of those things’ — there was no obvious cause.
The same day, I was taken to the operating theatre, where a cardiologist inserted a stent to open the blocked artery. I was kept in hospital for three days. I was given medication to prevent future attacks, including aspirin, clopidogrel and candesartan.
Afterwards life seemed surreal. I was in shock that this had happened to me — a person who is not a traditional heart attack patient.
I spend my life advising patients on losing weight and staying healthy, and now I’d had a heart attack; clearly sometimes they happen despite your best efforts to stay healthy.
Now I’m back to running and eating healthily — but I’m telling my story to warn others not to ignore signs of a heart attack, even if you are young, sporty and seemingly healthy.