~Lynn Wiles
Lynn Wiles of Albany knows firsthand that heart attack symptoms can be different in women.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in layoffs in her department at a local agency where her team provided job-placement assistance for developmentally disabled community members.
Worries about her clients, co-workers and staff added to the stress of navigating her life, career and being there for her family in the midst of the global pandemic. So, when she started noticing subtle symptoms, she figured she was suffering from anxiety.
“I did have a tightening in my chest,” she said. “If you make a fist and imagine that being inside of your chest cavity, that is what it felt like.”
She became easily fatigued and started taking naps during the day.
“One time when I was gardening, I laid down on the lawn, I felt so tired,” she said.
Both of her arms tingled and her hands felt achy.
“It’s hard to explain, but I felt outside of my body,” Lynn said. “I thought I was having anxiety attacks.”
She did think it was strange when her cat suddenly started laying on her chest. Though her family has a history of heart disease, her blood pressure was normal, and she practiced a healthy lifestyle and diet. She had no idea she had a 99% blockage in an artery in her heart, but she thinks the cat knew.
She’d been experiencing symptoms for 10 days when it happened.
She and her husband, Kent, spent the morning running errands. As they were unloading groceries from the car, her husband came into the house to find his wife on the dining room floor. She wasn’t moving. Her eyes were half open and she was making a strange gurgling sound that, they found out later, meant Lynn was near death.
Kent checked for her pulse and found none. As her lips started turning blue, he called 911, put the phone on speaker and started CPR — which he’d learned more than 40 years ago as a lifeguard in college but had never done before. Following the instructions of the 911 operator, Kent did chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After several minutes, a neighbor who is a physician’s assistant heard the commotion, came in the open front door and took over CPR. When the paramedics arrived a short while later, they took over and administered shocks with an automated external defibrillator, or AED.
After establishing a pulse, the paramedics rushed Lynn to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center where doctors concluded she had suffered a heart attack caused by the blockage in her artery. The heart attack (caused, essentially, by a plumbing problem in the heart) triggered the cardiac arrest (an electrical failure). She woke up later in the ICU to find Kent had saved her life. A stent had been placed in her heart. She was going to be OK.
According to the American Heart Association, cardiac arrests that happen outside a hospital claim the lives of nearly 350,000 people in the United States each year. Only about 10% survive. Many things lined up for Lynn that day to keep her on the “alive” side of this statistic.
Her husband usually worked long days serving seniors with disabilities, and it happened to be his day off. Trained in CPR, Kent knew what to do. Their neighbor, the physician’s assistant, stepped up to help. Paramedics responded quickly and got her heart going again and at Good Sam, doctors opened up the artery with a stent and started her on her path to recovery.
“My husband calls me a walking miracle,” Lynn said.
Hindsight is 20-20, but Lynn knows now that she should have had the symptoms checked out by a doctor.
“I just wanted to be OK for my husband, daughter and cat,” she said. “Women, and moms especially, a lot of them don’t pay attention to their symptoms and deny them so that they will be OK for everyone else.”
Lynn now works as a medical office receptionist at Samaritan Cardiology, along with the team that helped save her life and assisted in her recovery. Her experience as a patient adds a level of passionate engagement to her work with cardiac patients.
“There have been times when patients have expressed extreme anxiety to me and I have let them know I am a patient as well,” Lynn said. “I’m able to tell them ‘You are in really good hands here.”
The symptoms of a heart attack can be much more subtle than sudden chest pain. These types of muted symptoms occur more often in women than in men.
Other symptoms to be aware of include shortness of breath, cold sweats, fatigue, jaw and back pain, palpitations or heart racing, and gastrointestinal symptoms like nausea and indigestion. When the symptoms are not what they expect, women might not seek care. That can have drastic consequences
