I thought it was anxiety, but it was a heart attack

My best friend is a retired emergency room doctor, and he has seen it all. Yet when I met him for a weekend walk recently and told him I wasn’t feeling well, he and I both attributed my symptoms to anxiety.

In reality, I was having a heart attack. The classic symptoms of a heart attack are “chest pain and pressure that radiates to the left arm and jaw,” Grant Reed, an interventional cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, later told me. But they’re not the only symptoms.

“People can experience a range of symptoms that also include shortness of breath, sweating, nausea and other symptoms. Females and diabetics can have many of the symptoms other than discomfort,” Reed said.

That was the case for me. On that recent fateful weekend, I told my friend I was anxious, attributing it to stress about my elderly mother’s health. My breathing also felt shallow, and my left arm was numb. But I didn’t have chest pain or pressure, nor was pain shooting down my arm.

As we began our walk through a park, my friend checked my pulse repeatedly. It was steady, and he recommended measured breaths to help me relax. I did as he instructed, but as we continued our walk, I couldn’t get a deep breath. And after walking half a mile, I had to stop.

“We need to go to the hospital and have this checked out,” my friend said. We turned around to walk back to where we parked, and I called my wife. After a few minutes, I had to stop again. Then, my friend noticed I was sweating profusely. That tripped his alarm.

I’m 66 years old, and 12 years ago, I had my first wake-up call when my doctor spotted an anomaly on a treadmill test during my routine physical.

Subsequently, a cardiologist placed two stents, or mesh coils, inside my arteries to keep them open and improve blood flow.

Walking has always been a respite for me, and for 15 years I’ve met my doctor buddy once a week for a stroll. But on the day of my heart attack, I knew something wasn’t right.

The next thing I knew, the emergency room staff was slapping a defibrillator pad on my back. Someone gave me an aspirin with a sip of water. Someone else put a nitroglycerin tablet under my tongue.

Moments later, an electrocardiogram revealed I was having a heart attack, and a nurse and an orderly propelled me on a stretcher down a series of hallways — ceiling lights flashing by at breakneck speed — to the cardiac catheterization lab, where imaging of my arteries revealed the total blockage of one of my previous stents.

A cardiologist cleared the obstruction and inserted a new stent inside the old one.

It turned out I’d had a so-called widowmaker heart attack, in which the largest artery in the heart — the left anterior descending artery — is blocked. That artery provides 50% of the heart muscle’s blood supply, and “a widowmaker is immediately life-threatening,” the Cleveland Clinic says. Mine was 100% obstructed.

Reed and my friend both noted panic attacks often mimic heart attacks. Shortness of breath is common to both. Typically, though, panic attacks resolve in about 10 minutes, Reed said.

“Definitely seek medical attention if your symptoms do not resolve quickly. ... The consequences of missing a heart attack can be very severe.”