Monday, June 09, 2008

Not a heart attack (War of the Roses)

Well, yesterday evening was interesting…

Just prior to sitting down to Sunday tea at my parents I started to get a little indigestion. I seem to have had indigestion a lot recently on and off, especially near the start of this year and as such, I though little of it. I eat my tea and slowly the indigestion got worse and worse and started to get rather painful.

I asked my Dad if he had any paracetemol to take for the pain, which I did. Then things really got interesting… The pain got so bad that I could not stand without leaning on something, also, breathing started to become somewhat difficult.

At this stage my parents telephoned for an ambulance. They lead me to a chair and sat me down. By this stage the pain was almost unbearable, certainly worse than anything I have ever felt before. I had turn completely white, was sweating absolutely buckets and was literally rasping for breath and very, very close to passing out.

It felt just like I was having a heart attack.

Then suddenly (and certainly before the ambulance arrived) the pain just vanished. I still felt somewhat groggy and very, very drained, but otherwise not too bad.

The ambulance arrived, took my blood pressure, ECG and did other tests. They seemed somewhat puzzled by my condition (as my blood pressure and other readings were just fine and dandy), but took me up to the hospital anyway.

It was whilst I was lying in the back of the ambulance that I was suddenly reminded of the film The War of the Roses. Near the beginning of this film Michael Douglas’s character is in a restaurant and starts to get (what he believes to be) a heart attack. He is wheeled off to hospital in the full belief that he is about to die only to find out that it was nothing more than severe indigestion, which, if extremely severe can feel just like a heart attack.

It occurred to me that this is likely what had happened to me (bearing in mind that I wasn’t dead and that the pain had gone so suddenly), however the nurses in the ambulance seemed rather perplexed.

After being checked out at the hospital and speaking to the doctor, I was informed that this was very much what had happened to me. In effect the acid from my stomach travelled up my food pipe, which is what happens when you get indigestion. However, this in turn made my food pipe spasm, causing the pain and heart attack like symptoms. As I was now perfectly fine, they discharged me and sent me home.

So, all in all, an eventful evening… Which also goes to prove that you can learn something useful sometimes from watching films...

3 comments:

Sinbad said...

Ouch.

Anonymous said...

welcome back!
Was it really the good old guernsey food? :D

Bazlurgan said...

Is that a jibe against my Mum's home cooking?!?

Hopefully not an experience to be repeated...