Word: chesting
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...lifesaving treatments--clot-busting drugs, emergency angioplasty, beta-blockers--increases your chances of survival. We've all learned a lot about the Electoral College in this presidential election, but the most important lesson may be the one Dick Cheney taught us about paying attention to even the smallest chest pains...
...trick with heart attacks is to know what to look for, and that's not always easy. Cheney experienced the classic chest pains called angina--usually described as a squeezing pain that starts in the center of the chest and can radiate to the shoulders, neck, arms or back. Angina is the body's way of telling you that your heart is being starved; the heart muscle is screaming for the oxygen-rich blood that's not getting through a blocked or constricted coronary artery...
...body's message is not always so clear. You can have angina without necessarily having a heart attack, and you can have a heart attack without the chest pains of angina. Fully one-third of all heart-attack victims feel no muscle pain at all, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association last summer. Their most common symptom is extreme shortness of breath or difficulty in breathing. Other signs include nausea, profuse sweating, lightheadedness, fainting, palpitations or unexplained anxiety...
...classic case of mistaken identity is when a patient suffering from acute heartburn confuses a backflow of stomach acid with a developing cardiac arrest (although you should be wary of any "heartburn" that doesn't go away or gets worse as you walk around). Tension and injuries in the chest muscles can also be mistaken for angina...
Indeed, Cheney is so attuned to the vagaries of his heart that when he was awakened last Wednesday around 3:30 a.m. by a discomfort in his chest, he realized at once that he couldn't dismiss it as simple indigestion. It wasn't intense pain, Cheney told the press two days later. But, he said, "it lasted long enough, it was steady enough, it didn't change when I breathed deeply or moved around" that he decided--correctly--to have it checked without delay. (See this week's Personal Time: Your Health...