This Is What a Heart Attack Feels Like

This Is What a Heart Attack Feels Like

Susan Madero, 66, Los Angeles

On Valentine's Day, 2015, Susan Madero was sitting in a movie theater watching American Sniper when she started feeling very full, as though she had eaten a big meal — odd, because she hadn't had dinner. Then the indigestion set in, and the sensation of a very large person sitting on her chest. Everything inside of her ribs started to tighten, and she grew short of breath. But Madero knew her husband wanted to see the end of the movie, and talked herself into believing the leftover Chinese food she ate at lunch was just giving her trouble. “It wasn't until I started having pain in my right shoulder and arm, followed with pain in the front of my neck and then up to my jaw, that I thought something was seriously wrong,” she says. But even then she didn't say anything. “Being a woman, I didn't want to make a big deal of this."

After the movie ended she told her husband, “Maybe we should go to the hospital.” Once there, an EKG revealed nothing abnormal. And Madero felt so much better while waiting for further tests, she decided to go home. So, having been there an hour, Madero signed a waiver confirming that she was refusing further medical treatment, and left.

Later that night she was awakened by the same disturbing symptoms she experienced in the movie theater, but decided to “sleep them off.” By daybreak, she could no longer deny that something was terribly wrong. She pulled out her blood pressure cuff; her pressure was 192/98. She and her husband drove to the hospital, although to this day she regrets not having called 911. While her earlier EKG was normal, a second one told a different story. Indeed, Madero had 100 percent blockage in one artery, 98 percent blockage in another and 50 percent in three others.

“I was having a STEMI – a ST-elevation myocardial infarction,” Madero explains. A STEMI, also known as a “widow-maker,” is characterized by 100 percent blockage of the left anterior descending artery, the one that transports a major amount of blood to the heart. If blocked, the heart can run out of oxygen and stop beating. “I will never forget the cardiologist's reaction when he first saw those blocked arteries. He just said, ‘Wow!'"

He also asked if she'd been having any chest pains. In fact, she had been feeling short of breath for several months, but wasn't concerned. “I figured if I could still work out and run on the treadmill, I must be fine,” she says, adding that she believes her every-other-day exercise regiment helped make her strong enough to survive her near fatal heart attack.

Now, she says, her mission is to make more women aware of the signs and symptoms of heart attack and heart disease, and “not to shrug them off."

Robert Neyhard, 70, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

"Honest to God, I thought it was indigestion,” Robert Neyhard says of “the most horrible pain in my chest” he felt in the middle of an October 2018 night. The local radio talk show host didn't want to stir his wife, so he tiptoed out of their bedroom, drank a glass of 7-Up, and swallowed some antacid pills. “After a big burp I thought, ‘Well, OK, all is fine.'"

The pain subsided a bit over the next couple of days, but would return with a punch, doubling him over. “I couldn't even stand up,” Neyhard recalls, admitting that he felt reassured that he was not having a heart attack because he didn't feel pain down his arms. “I didn't tell anyone, and just hid it and took Motrin and Pepto-Bismol. I was in denial."

Or maybe what Neyhard was feeling was so different from the sledgehammer to the chest he experienced during his first heart attack, at age 49, that he couldn't see the link. That time, right away he knew what was wrong — after all, his father had died of a heart attack at 63; his mother at 36. That time, Neyhard rushed to the home of a neighbor, a doctor, just a few houses away. “It was the perfect storm,” he says today of all his cardiac risk factors. “I had bad genes, was exposed to Agent Orange in Nam, and didn't take care of myself."

The pain that jarred him from sleep some two decades later “was a different kind of pain,” he says. “It lingered."

His wife urged him to see the doctor, but Neyhard kept insisting it was just bad indigestion. After all, he had a checkup every six months, felt more like 40 than 70, and was vigilant about taking his medications. “I had no pains, no aches. I had blood work every six months. If I was in denial, it was because I felt OK,” he says.

But his wife knew otherwise, “Not for three days!” she shot back when her husband kept insisting he had heartburn — and went ahead and made an appointment for him on her own. When Neyhard walked in the office, he says, his physician “looked at me and said, ‘I need you to go to the hospital right now.'"

After just 10 minutes in the emergency room, doctors were catheterizing him, explaining that he was mid-heart attack, and had been for nearly a week. That was on a Friday. Five days later, he was still in ICU, waiting to be fitted with a cardiac vest to stabilize his heart. That's when he went code blue. “I only realized what happened after they hit me with the paddles a couple of times. It was very dark, and I could hear someone screaming in the distance,” he recalls about the two minutes he spent without a beating heart. “Eventually I realized that someone was me.”

Neyhard spent eight days in the hospital before being discharged with a defibrillator implant — to help in case of future heart outages.

Cathie Lazarus, 58, Manhattan Beach, California

TV producer Cathie Lazarus was two months into her training to be a volunteer for the Los Angeles Police Department Reserves when she appeared to have dropped dead on the gym floor. “I was doing interval training with a new personal trainer; I had just finished throwing a weighted ball back and forth while also doing situps,” she recalls. But that's about all the divorced mother of two grown daughters remembers about the event that nearly took her life at age 52. “I'm told that I stood up after finishing and said, ‘Whoa!’ and dropped. My heart and breathing stopped instantly. Can you imagine being my trainer and thinking you had just killed your client? I didn't regain consciousness for a couple of days."

Lazarus suffered a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) — different from a heart attack in that it's an electrical issue rather than a mechanical one, and a phenomenon that kills more often than it spares. Basically it's like a fuse blew out, but that fuse was her heart. “Cardiac arrest causes sudden death,” she says. “So I felt nothing.” Indeed, about 90 percent of SCAs prove fatal, according to the AHA. Only some 25 percent of those who survive can point to any symptoms that preceded their SCA.

Bystanders at the gym and, eventually, paramedics, spent nearly 30 minutes doing CPR, trying to bring Lazarus back. And the EMTs continued performing CPR until her heart finally started beating on its own at the hospital.

Lazarus was 18 when she learned she had a heart murmur. But she says she was never instructed to follow up. After her SCA, she was diagnosed with a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). “If you ever hear of young athletes dropping dead on the field, they typically have this disease,” she says, explaining that now she has an implanted cardiac device that acts as a defibrillator in case of another SCA.

"I was super-lucky,” she says, noting that only some 5 to 10 percent of those who survive a SCA don't have cognitive deficits as a result. “It takes my breath away when I think about that."

Angelo Keyes, 54, Dallas

Bodybuilder. Gym rat. Retired semipro football player. Angelo Keyes is all of those things. So in 2014 when the entrepreneur was at the gym lifting weights to strengthen his shoulders and chest, he didn't think much of the strain he felt in those areas. “You get so used to those aches and pains and nicks and dings,” he says. “I thought I had pulled a muscle in my chest and shoulder."

But the pain persisted. A trained CPR instructor, Keyes phoned his wife. “I told her, ‘If I didn't know any better, I would think I was having a heart attack.'” She told him to head straight for the hospital a mile down the road, but he told her he was coming home to lie down. But first he needed to run a brief errand. “That took about five minutes, and by the time I was done I could barely stand up. I realized I really was having a heart attack.” He called his wife and asked her to take him to the hospital.

Keyes’ vitals there were fine. But a catherization revealed significant blockages in three of his arteries. “The doctor came in and told me I needed emergency surgery,” he says.

Waking up in the ICU after a triple bypass, Keyes says, “I was in the most pain I had ever felt. I felt like I was suffocating and couldn't breathe.” Yet because he had that procedure, when he had another heart attack a year later Keyes again missed the signs. “I was at the gym again, lifting weights,” he says. “I came home and just wasn't feeling good, but figured, I had the bypass, everything should be fine.” It wasn't. “The doctors got on me for waiting too long to come in,” he says. “But the pain really wasn't as bad as the first one."

Nor was the pain that marked his third heart attack, in 2017, when again he was working out at the gym. “I started feeling funny and this time I didn't wait.” Keyes rushed himself to the hospital, where they inserted a stent. But three heart attacks in three years was too much for the attending cardiologist to let pass. So he ordered an advanced lipid test, which revealed a genetic disposition to producing bad cholesterol and clotting. “Finally, I had an explanation for why this was happening,” says Keyes, who has virtually abandoned meat in exchange for a mostly plant-based diet. “I have steak maybe once a week,” he says. “That's my treat."