Partner had a heart attack.

Zoob · April 27, 2024

Think I'm still in shock really. Lots to process. This happened on Tuesday night. She's doing ok, and actually moved from intensive care to the intermediate care unit last night. The whole thing has made it far easier to not worry about our derby defeat, but I wouldn't recommend near death of a loved one as a way of highlighting life priorities and avoiding football annoyance.

My partner is 42, never smoked, not overweight, decently active, eats fairly well, no history of heart disease in the family. The heart attack was caused by something called a SCAD (spontaneous coronary artery dissection) and there isn't a huge amount of data around what causes this. SCAD accounts of only between 0.5% and 4% of serious heart issues that require hospitalisation, and then the artery that was effected (left main) only gets impacted in 4% of SCAD cases. So it's all a super rare event within a super rare event.

What's also mad is that a week before the heart attack, she had severe chest pains and pains down her arms, and we went to the emergency room, and they did a load of tests, and told us it wasn't the heart, it's likely GERD (aka acid indigestion) and told her to follow up with a gastroenterologist. On Tuesday evening, right after eating, she had severe chest and arm pains again. She also threw up. Think we both initially thought it was indeed stomach related. But thank f**k that despite her being super stoical, she knew something was wrong and asked me to call an ambulance. My brother in the UK completely f***ed his back a couple months ago and had to wait 5 hours for an ambulance. Thankfully over here they were here within 5 minutes, and had they not, she probably would have died. Think I'm traumatized by how close she came to death. The ambulance crew did an EKG on her here, and just cut most of her upper clothes off so they could attach pads to her incase they needed to resuscitate her.

She's alive, but not out of the woods yet, because one of her minor arteries is still blocked, and will not become unblocked (stent and angiogram did not work). So they are saying the heart will find a new pathway. But since we don't know what caused the SCAD, and there may be others, and her heart is still under strain, etc etc. Surgery isn't really an option unless you're talking heart transplant and we don't want to go down that path. Ooft.

Ibby · April 27, 2024