Heart attacks are life threatening. How soon you get medical help can be the difference between life and death and/or your future quality of life. The American Heart Association (AHA) warns us that minutes matter.
What is a heart attack?
A heart attack, often called a coronary attack, is also known as a myocardial infarction (MI), coronary thrombosis, and coronary occlusion. Your heart is a muscle. It needs oxygen to survive. The blood vessels that bring oxygen to your heart are called coronary arteries. A heart attack occurs when the blood flow in one or more of your coronary arteries is cut off or significantly reduced, keeping life saving oxygen from feeding your heart. It takes only minutes without oxygen for damage to occur to your heart muscle; every minute can result in more damage. The quicker you can open a blocked artery, the better chances you have to survive and prevent further heart damage. Hence the term, time is muscle.
What are the symptoms of a heart attack?
Most people are aware of what the AHA calls the “movie heart attack,” which is the sudden and intense one when all of a sudden you have severe pain in the middle of your chest, become short of breath, and have pain down your left arm. True these are symptoms, but most heart attacks don’t act like this. Rather, they come on slowly with only chest discomfort or mild pain. Many people do not recognize it as a heart attack and waste precious time by not getting the help they need.
Symptoms include:
- Chest discomfort in the center of your chest such as a feeling of fullness, pressure, squeezing or pain, which lasts more than a few minutes, or comes and goes;
- Pain or discomfort in other areas of your upper body, such as your jaw, back, neck, one or both arms, and/or stomach;
- Shortness of breath;
- Other symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, cold sweats and/or lightheadedness;
- Women may or may not have chest discomfort. Women are more likely to have the other symptoms such as pressure or pain in the lower chest or upper abdomen, shortness of breath, dizziness lightheadedness, fainting, upper back pressure, and/or extreme fatigue.
What should you do if you think you might be having a heart attack?
The AHA recommends if you have any of these symptoms, “Don’t wait more than five minutes before calling for help. Call 9-1-1 and get to a hospital right away.” Why? It takes only minutes without oxygen to cause damage to your heart.
You may have heard to take aspirin if you are having a heart attack. The AHA does not recommend you take an aspirin before calling 9-1-1. The AHA recommends, “Don’t do anything before calling 9-1-1. In particular, don’t take an aspirin, and then wait to relieve your pain. Don’t postpone calling 9-1-1. Aspirin won’t treat your heart attack by itself.”
The AHA goes on to say, “After you call 9-1-1, the 9-1-1 operator may recommend you take an aspirin. He or she can make sure that you don’t have an allergy to aspirin or a condition that makes using it too risky. If the 9-1-1 operator doesn’t talk to you about taking aspirin, the emergency medical technicians or the physician in the Emergency Department will give you an aspirin if it’s right for you. Research shows that getting an aspirin early in the treatment of a heart attack, along with other treatments the EMTs and Emergency Department (ED) physicians provide, can significantly improve your chances of survival.”
Where should you go if you think you are having a heart attack?
Not everyone who has chest pain is having a heart attack. Treatment in the ED depends on the cause of your chest pain. If there is a chance you are having a heart attack, you will need to be admitted to a hospital for emergency treatment which includes close monitoring in an intensive care unit (ICU), medications, possible emergency procedures, and/or surgery, services which are only available in hospitals.
The National Association for Ambulatory Care helps us decide when to go to an urgent care center or an Emergency Department. They recommend, “If you have a serious condition – stroke, heart attack, severe bleeding, head injury or other major trauma – go straight to the nearest ER. Don’t take a chance with anything life-threatening. The ER is the best place for these and other critical conditions.”
The terms, minutes matter and time equals muscle, are not new to hospital administrators. They too know the sooner you get treatment, the better your chances for survival and preventing heart muscle damage. Since “time equals muscle,” and “minutes matter,” hospitals are measured by how fast patients who are having heart attacks get treated from the time they walk in the door of the hospital.
I don’t know about you, but I know if I, one of my loved ones, or one of my patients were having a life-threatening event, I would strongly recommend going directly to a Level I Emergency Department that is located within a hospital.
Next month learn about how Time Matters when you have a stroke.
Joy Pape, RN BSN CDE WOCN FAADE
EnJOY Life! Health Consulting, LLC
130 Barrow Street, Suite 213
New York, NY 10014
212-933-7156
