A 22-year-old fitness coach is lucky to be alive after she was suddenly struck by a deadly “widow maker” heart attack while she was driving.
Faith Harrison was suddenly struck by strange tingly sensations in her arms while driving back from a hockey match earlier this year.
She said the “pins and needles” were so severe she had to quickly swerve off the road.
“My left arm fell completely numb but at the same time I had pins and needles spread down my right arm,” recalls Harrison from Shropshire, England.
As she brought the car to a halt in a layby, Harrison’s condition quickly took a turn for the worse.
“I developed a crushing tightness in my chest and that’s when a feeling of dark, impending doom suddenly came over me that seemed to say: ‘You’re going to die.’”
She spent a few minutes catching her breath and rubbing at her numb arms before deciding to continue with her drive to her parents’ house, which was closer than her own home.
The young healthy woman, who was in peak physical condition, had no idea that the pins and needles in her arms were the first sign that she was having a heart attack.
Faith, who has always kept herself healthy, then developed a “crushing tightness” in her chest
“I couldn’t work out what was going on, there was no obvious reason for me to feel this bad,” she says.
And when she did later learn what the problem was, the diagnosis left her reeling.
Despite her youth and fitness, Harrison, who was a semi-professional athlete at the time, was, in fact, having a heart attack.
It wasn’t just a minor heart attack, however.
A large clot had blocked one of the major blood vessels leading to her heart.
Doctors refer to this form of heart attack as a “widow maker” due to its poor survival rates.
But the young woman had no idea of the danger she was in as she sat in her car and decided to summon up her strength to drive on to her parents’ home.
By the time she arrived 45 minutes later, still unaware of what was happening, “I could only walk around hunched over,” she says.
“Seeing me in this state, my dad rang 111 [non-emergency medical help] and they advised me to get to hospital as soon as possible.”
Her dad bundled her into the car and took her to the nearby Princess Royal Hospital in Telford.
“I felt everything in me slowing down, as if my organs were closing down inside me,” says Faith.
“By the time we arrived, I was so weak, I couldn’t speak – Dad spoke for me.”
She was swiftly given morphine for the pain and was rushed in for an ECG, a test that measured the electrical activity in the heart.
This revealed irregularities and abnormalities in her heart rhythm.
The ECG showed she’d had a heart attack.
“I heard: ‘Your daughter has had a heart attack’ and I was terrified but felt hysterical: I was laughing one second, then crying the next.”
“I couldn’t understand it – not only was I playing hockey at county level, I also did all kinds of other sports and went to the gym several times a week – I could lift 100kg deadweight.”
Harrison was put into an ambulance and blue-lighted to the Royal Stoke University Hospital for surgery to remove the clot.
“My dad was crying as I was wheeled to theater,” recalls Faith.
While she was awake under a local anesthetic, doctors went to retrieve the clot via a vein in her wrist.
Doctors said it was a “miracle” that Harrison survived.
She now wants to send out a warning that even super-fit people can have heart attacks
“It turned out my left ascending artery – the biggest of the heart’s blood vessels – was 99 percent blocked with a clot,” she recalls.
“I saw it as they removed it – it was a long, long snake of blood and other tissue.
“The doctor later told me this kind of huge heart attack was called the widow maker because only 12 percent of those who have it survive.”
Faith spent three days in hospital after the attack in January this year and has been slowly recovering since.
“Doctors told me I was a ‘miracle’ and ‘shouldn’t be here’,” she says.
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