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.
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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.
Last week, this woman experienced a life-threatening heart attack and her symptoms gave her every reason to ignore it.
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.
Her symptoms were painful, but flared up in unexpected places.
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.
Worse yet, this woman had a perfectly explainable reason to experience those pains.
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.
Sadly, she seemed to have a week that added stress factor after stress factor to her heart.
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.
Fortunately, her story had a happy ending. But that isn’t how things turn out for a lot of women.
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.
However, this doesn’t mean that a sudden, crushing chest pain is suddenly nothing to worry about for women.
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.
