The Silent Symptom of a Heart Attack

It was late February 2004, a day that would forever change my life. Early that morning, my husband woke me to inform me that he was sick and didn't know what was wrong. He stated that he was hurting in his back and thought that he may have pulled a muscle. He was in alot of pain and was unable to lie down. When I finally got him to settle down enough, I asked was he having a heart attack and he said no, that he was hurting in his back all the way up to his shoulder blades. My husband had three previous heart attacks and none of them ever began in this manner. They were always the normal symptoms you hear about. The stinging in the arms and tightness in the chest. We have a blood pressure monitor in our home and my husband asked me to take his blood pressure. As I put the cuff on his arm and took the reading, it seemed as if something was wrong with the monitor because it read "XXXX" all the way across.

It had never done that before, so thinking that I didn't have the cuff on right, my husband decided he would do it himself. But before he could get it on, he stated that he felt really sick, like he had to vomit and so he made his way to the bathroom as I was calling 911. After vomiting, he made his way back to the bed and as he laid down he told me he couldn't feel his legs, that they were numb and cold. He asked me to massage them to try to get some feeling back into them and it was at this point that I realized my husband was dying. Because as I lifted one of his legs, it was ice cold, just like a dead body. I ran to my daughter's room and told her she needed to wake up and watch for the ambulance because daddy was very sick. My oldest daughter was 13 at that time. When I returned to the bedroom, and I probably wasn't gone two minutes, my husband had already passed. I couldn't save him and I knew when the paramedics arrived that they couldn't save him either. At the hospital, the doctors and the coroner determined he died of a massive heart attack.