When even doctors can have a hard time telling what's wrong with us sometimes, it's clear that identifying the signs of a serious medical problem is not an easy task.
Sometimes, the body can get us all worried that something major is going on only to go away once we pass gas.
However, one woman's Twitter posts are an important reminder that this cruel guessing game can be even harder for women. That's especially true when a heart attack might be looming.
The fact that they lingered for weeks right until her situation turned critical might be the scariest part. They gave her just enough time to get used to them.
As she said, she experienced it in her upper back, shoulders, and arms. According to The Atlantic, these are spots where women are more likely to experience heart attack symptoms than men.
The neck and the jaw are also common areas where heart attack pains can flare up.
After spending a week cleaning out a barn, most of us would think nothing of some persistent shoulder pains.
If she never experienced the sweating and nausea that worried her, she likely wouldn’t have survived to tell us this.
In this post, she makes the important point that the pain didn't feel severe enough to worry her that much. The location isn't the only deceptively subtle thing about female heart attack symptoms.
According to the American Heart Association, heart disease causes a death per minute among women and more of them die from heart disease than cancer and diabetes combined.
After all, this woman had all of the classic symptoms and her heart attack was just as real. The subtler signs are just, unfortunately, more common.
Unlike the first woman, Laura's heart attack didn't come from plaque build-up in an artery, but rather a tear in the artery wall that can block blood flow.
This type of heart attack, called spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) often has no warning signs at all.
