A couple of weeks ago, my middle niece came to spend the weekend with her mother. This niece lives somewhere in the sticks on the other side of Tampa. Her husband can never be bothered to come with her but he always and I mean always calls my niece several times, trying to guilt her into coming home to help him with some imaginary emergency. This time, he was having chest pain and wanted her to drive the thirty or so miles home to call 911 for him. She told him to call 911 himself on the grounds that he could die before she got home if he didn’t. Well, he didn’t call and my niece found him dead on the floor of their home. He was 70 years old, exactly my age. He was a different kind of guy. If you weren’t with him, you could think of a dozen reasons why you didn’t like him but if he was around, you realized he was really a likable guy. I’ll miss him.
One more vote for getting chest pain checked out, especially if you’ve got a history of heart trouble. My mother had a Takotsubo cardiomyopathy about two years ago. She’d been in a minor accident that day, and it seems that the stress of the accident was likely the final straw for the attack. She spent the afternoon, and evening, ignoring the pain and shortness of breath she was feeling, attributing it all to bruising from the seatbelt.
Fortunately, when she tried to go to sleep the pain got to be too much and she ended up being taken by ambulance to the ER, where she was having trouble maintaining blood oxygenation, until they figured out what was going on. (Alas, that didn’t happen until after she coded. OTOH, if you do have to go into cardiac arrest, in the ER is the best place for it.)
Since then we’ve been back to the ER, at least once, with general heartburn symptoms, because we didn’t want to mess around. I tell you: It’s like magic, going to the triage nurse, telling them that you’ve got a history of cardiac illness and you’re having chest pains. You get back into an examination room ASAP. Everyone in the ER took the time to make sure we knew they’d rather have her present for what’s a minor condition, than to have her assume it’s not important.