I recently went to the funeral of an old and dear friend who died from a heart attack, and another friend contacted us today about a recent heart attack he had wanting to ask some questions about my heart attack.
I looked up a post I made several years ago about my heart attack on a closed group of Auctioneers after an Auctioneer friend from Idaho asked me to do so. I have copied it here in the Hope’s that it my yet help someone else.
Randy Wells asked me let everyone know what I felt like before I had my heart attack.
I had thought about doing this before but did not thinking that many of you have had heart attacks yourselves and to you it is old hat, but I think that there may be something here to help others.
Looking back it is a little easier to see signs I missed. Tina and I walk a lot, often 3 miles or so. Recently I have found myself asking her to slow down a bit so I could keep up. That was a sign, I didn’t catch it at the time but it has a flashing light on it for me now. If you are asking your spouse to slow down on a walk, it is because you are having shortness of breath.
On the day I had my heart attack I woke up feeling anxious. I made a comment to Tina that I felt very very anxious. I could not put my finger on why. My shoulders and neck were very stiff and tense. I felt like I needed a massage, I could not pop my neck, just very tense and anxious. I think my body knew something was wrong. I think it was telling me so. I just missed it. I told my son and daughter to go easy on me when they first showed up at work because I was very anxious. My chest did not feel like I was being crushed. I felt tense. I chalked it up to being worried about our auction because Tina had vertigo due to an inner ear infection and was not coming to the auction. I know how much she does lotting the items out and keeping the consignors straight so I attributed my anxiousness to missing my wife at the auction.
I helped move items into the American Legion Post (including a pinball machine), but I noticed that when we stopped to eat that I felt full before I ate more than a slice of pizza. Then my chest started feeling a bit tight, it was not a big deal. Imagine that you had put on a shirt that was a size to small. Not a big squeeze, more like a minor discomfort. I was feeling some nausea, but since Tina had an inner ear infection with vertigo and was throwing up a lot I thought I was just feeling queezy in some sort of sympathetic sickness type of thing and wrote it off.
I normally am the one who gets the stuff unpacked on the trailer while the crew carries it in and that is exactly what I did on this day. I felt a bit tired when I was doing this, OK very tired.
I put the pinball machine together, got it working, and set up my computer. While I was doing this the crew was getting the other items set up and sorted out. I went to the back of the hall and laid down across several chairs. I was just very very tired. Remember that I found out later that I had a 100% blockage on one of my arteries (still a little unclear which one but I think it is the one on the left side), and a 50%, 40% and 20% blockage on the others.
So, the auction is starting soon, I’m tired but the preview has started so there was not time to nap. I got up and started setting up the microphones. I started the auction and we clipped along but it started feeling like my shirt was shrinking, XLarge, Large, Medium, Small… but it passed. The auction went on.
Tina and I have talked about this dozens of times. It seems to be quite common for a auctioneer to die of a heart attack. We jazz ourselves up on adrenaline for hour after hour. Some auctioneers still smoke, a lot of us eat out all the time (lots of salt and fat) and some of us are a bit over-weight. I didn’t think it would be me, I am only 54, I am 5′ 10″ tall and weigh 200 lbs at my height my ideal weight would be between 143 – 189 lbs, I get a lot of exercise by walking several miles 2 or 3 times a week, I have never smoked, I have used fat free milk for over 20 years, I use margarine, I don’t drink excessively, and have used sweeteners to keep my triglycerides down,a but I do have a father who had a quadruple bypass, a brother with congestive heart failure, and a grandmother who died of a heart attack. Looking back I see I was at elevated risk and it would have been very very smart to have asked my doctor to have my heart checked out. I had them run an EKG once or twice in the past. They came back fine. But not that I have been down this road that little xray of my heart that showed the blockage looks like a handy bit of information that I would have liked to have done earlier.
So there I am calling bids, with my shirt shrinking and I asked my son to step in. I thought “maybe I have to use the bathroom”. This is when I started thinking I was in trouble I didn’t have to use the bathroom but found myself alone, in a bathroom and the squeezing getting worse, now I’m starting to think “maybe this is a heart attack”. I heard myself going, “Whew, whew, whew!” as I was breathing and clenching up. I don’t mean I was wheezing, I was saying whew as in whew that was a great pitch. This is when I decided something was seriously wrong, the whews were in sync with slight squeezing across my chest, coming in waves. I thought “if this is a heart attack I could die in here, nobody will see me if I fall out” So, I went back out into the hall. I think this is the first decision I made that night that saved my life.
I did what any red blooded auctioneer would do, I starting ringing. I held up old movie posters, I joked around, what the heck the squeeze had gone. I was fine, I would just go home and sleep it off. I was just over tired. I put my daughter on the mike, and continued to ring. Then I called the last few items, and my shirt started to shrink again, XLarge, Large, Medium, Small, XSmall, I sat down and then my arms started to tingle. One of my bidders looked up and said are you OK? and I said NO, I don’t think I am OK at all? Another bidder asked if I had boxes so I walked out to the trailer and sat down and the first bidder followed me out. I said “I think I need to go to the hospital” second decision that saved my live.
My son said I’ll drive you and I said “no, call an ambulance” third decision.
When the ambulance arrived I was sitting down with my feet propped up on a table looking all cool calm and collected, in fact they could hardly believe that I was the patient. The flat did not believe me, not even a little bit. They said “well if you want we can run an EKG on you out in the ambulance”, I said “I would like that” fourth decision. I walked out to the ambulance and climbed in myself. They ran the EKG and then they started acting very very differently. They called in right away and put an 18 gauge needle in each arm for IVs and gave me the spray of Nitro. By the time we got the 15 minutes to the hospital they had given me nitro 3 times and I was on an IV and oxygen but had still turned gray.
The rest is just hospital stuff.
Summing up:
I was short of breath on walks and looking back should have had that checked out.
Tense Shoulders/Neck
Uneasy anxious
Nausea
Squeeze (shirt shrinking, not as bad as a blood pressure cuff but close toward the end)
Tingle in my arms, starting at the top and working it’s way to my fingers.
Hard time breathing, Whew, whew, whew
Now, it is your turn. I want to hear from others who have had a heart attack. My goal is to help someone else. I delayed calling an ambulance for over a half an hour while I tried to explain this away in my mind. I will never make that mistake again, nor should you.
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-attack/warning-signs-of-a-heart-attack