Comedianne Rosie O’Donnell recently announced that she had suffered a heart attack. She had helped a heavy woman get out of her car and a few hours later her body hurt.
“I had an ache in my chest, both my arms were sore, everything felt bruised,” she wrote on her blog.
Later, she felt “nauseous … clammy … very hot. … i threw up.”
Unfortunately, she didn’t seek medical attention until the next day when she saw a doctor who did an EKG and sent her to the hospital where she had a stent put in.
According to O’Donnell, her left anterior descending artery was “99 percent blocked.”
A woman suffers a heart attack every 90 seconds in the United States. Yet according to a 2009 American Heart Association survey only half of women indicated they would call 9-1-1 if they thought they were having a heart attack and few were aware of the most common heart attack symptoms.
If you should experience any of the following symptoms, call 9-1-1 immediately:
- Chest pain. Most heart attacks involve uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain in the center or left side of the chest.
- Unusual upper body discomfort. Women are more likely than men to experience sharp pain in the upper body as a symptom of a heart attack.
- Shortness of breath.
- Breaking out in a cold sweat.
- Unusual or unexplained fatigue. More than half of women having a heart attack experience unexplained or unusual tiredness and muscle fatigue not related to exercise.
- Light-headedness or sudden dizziness.
- Nausea. Women are twice as likely as men to experience nausea or vomiting as a sign of a heart attack.
