‘I had a funny pain and thought I’d pulled a muscle’
Alison Booth, 50, is divorced, has one son and lives near Bolton, Greater Manchester. She was a nurse for 24 years before doing home care. She had a heart attack two years ago.
‘I’d had a funny pain in my jaw and neck for a couple of days. It didn’t feel like indigestion and I thought I might have pulled a muscle. I was due to meet my sister on Friday evening for a drink and I still went ahead, though I mentioned the pain to her. I went to work on Monday as normal. It wasn’t until Wednesday, when I was visiting a client who suffered from dementia, that it got much worse. Even with my medical training it still never occurred to me that I might be having a heart attack. I felt fit and healthy, and two weeks before I’d been in the Lake District enjoying a seven-hour hike up the Langdale Pikes. When I began to feel really unwell, I rang my sister and she insisted on calling an ambulance. I think that the crew thought it was a panic attack. I ended up having emergency bypass surgery because one artery was almost completely blocked. There is no history of heart problems in my family and I didn’t have high blood pressure or cholesterol, but I did smoke, which, of course, I stopped immediately. Women are good at looking after other people, but we’re not always so good at looking after ourselves. It’s important not to dismiss strange symptoms and to listen to what your body is telling you.’
There are around seven million people living with heart and circulatory disease in the UK: half are men and half are women