Upon entering the emergency room, a patient presenting with chest pain and/or other symptoms of heart attack may experience the following.
The Emergency Room Staff will quickly asses the patient’s heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate. Electrodes will be placed on the chest which will allow the staff to take an electrocardiogram which can detect signs of insufficient blood flow, heart muscle damage, abnormal heartbeats, and other heart problems.
A lab technician will draw blood to test for certain enzymes and proteins which are released into the blood stream when heart cells die or are damaged.
I am 47, living in England. I had an angioplasty procedure (radial) last week to unblock a 100% occluded left anterior descending artery (two stents needed). The seriousness of my condition was only picked up on one of the ECGs of which I had about half a dozen when I was in hospital. They nearly discharged me before sending me for the angiogram, due to negative troponin assays. But an eagle eyed senior cardiologist spotted evidence of a high grade LAD lesion on the ECG. Thank God he did!
I’ve posted a short video about my recent experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYWS8HfEAJ0
Some serious heart conditions can be difficult to detect and even the cardiologist thought that I probably had just a narrowed artery (or perhaps not even that), and the angiogram was just a precaution.
If I had been discharged without having this test, then I would now be walking around thinking my heart was normal, and that my chest pain was just stress related! That really doesn’t bear thinking about.
All the best,
Al, UK