Rachel

Heart attack

Nurse struggles to identify her heart attack

Rachel talks about the heart attack symptoms she experienced and her struggle to identify them as a heart attack, not something else.

Rachel was working an eight-hour shift at Accident and Emergency during her heart attack. She joked with one of her workmates that if someone came in with the symptoms she had - the tiredness, lethargy, feeling fluey and the reflux symptoms - that normally they'd do an ECG to check on their heart.

It wasn't until the next day that Rachel felt so bad with what she thought was a gastro problem, she called an ambulance.

She was really embarrassed about calling an ambulance for something that she felt was so minor - until the specialist at the hospital said that they'd go straight up to the angio lab, identifying her symptoms as a heart attack.