Suddenly I felt extremely poorly. I handed my nine-month-old baby girl to a friend, and ran to the toilet. I had a feeling of impending doom, as if a big black cloud was looming over me, making every breath more meaningful. I understood immediately that something very serious was happening to me and that it was beyond my control. I collapsed on the floor, feeling as if my chest was being crushed and struggling to breathe. I felt sick and hot and sweaty. The pain I was enduring was so much worse than giving birth to any of my three babies.
I managed to get back to my friends, and what followed was chaos. An ambulance was called, and while we waited my kind friends tried in vain to help me – bringing me ice, water and a bag to breathe into. All I wanted at that moment, though, was to stare into my husband’s eyes because I needed him to be with me and to understand what I was saying to him. I managed to give him some brief instructions on what to do with the children, but I guess I was telling him something much more than that too.
The ambulance arrived, and the crew checked me over. They managed to calm me down a little and took an ECG (a measurement of the heartbeat). They said there was a slight abnormality, but because of my young age (36) and the fact that I led a healthy lifestyle and there was no family history of heart problems, they were happy to rule out anything serious there and then. Even so, we decided that I should go to the hospital immediately to get properly checked out.
After a few hours spent being looked over, I was eventually let home with some indigestion medicine!
I spent the next couple of days recovering and feeling traumatized by the whole event. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt something had changed inside me. A couple of days later, after clearing up the kitchen, the pain hit me again. It felt like a herd of elephants stamping on my chest. Each breath was tight and so painful. If at that moment someone had offered to cut off my right arm so that the pain would go away, I would readily have handed over the knife!
My husband called for an ambulance again, and events at the hospital this time started to unravel, like a really bad soap opera. It started with pure panic. I felt I was not being taken seriously and I was left alone in my cubicle, suffering in agony. I couldn’t call anyone to come and help me because the pain literally took my breath away. I thought I might die alone in that cubicle and not be found for hours. Eventually one student nurse looked at my ECG and her jaw dropped. Suddenly, I was no longer alone; the room was buzzing with people all around me. At one point I had three cardiologists looking at my heart trace chart, saying that it was telling them that I was having a heart attack but that they didn’t believe it – because of my age, lifestyle, etc.
The next morning, I was told by a cardiologist that my blood tests showed I had suffered a very serious heart attack.
I was relieved that I had survived, but felt numb with disbelief. In fact, I got really cross with the doctor for talking such rubbish! I just wanted to go home.
Unfortunately, it was quite a while before I did. Throughout the day, I started to suffer more chest pains. I could feel myself sinking lower and lower and I kept being moved from one bed to another, closer and closer to the Cardiac Care Unit. I needed to be monitored constantly and my heart rhythm was doing some amazing acrobatics. A nurse was sent to take a scan of my heart. I suppose it is down to my natural optimism that I still expected her to say, ‘Oh everything’s fine ... probably eaten something dodgy!’ But her expression was grave. She has since told me that she was shocked – it was the most excessive damage she has ever seen in anyone so young.
I continued to deteriorate and was eventually wheeled into the Coronary Care High Dependency Unit. It had a very different feel about it – all white, very high ceilings, voices echoing. The beds in this unit had very wide spaces between them to accommodate the rescue teams of doctors and nurses. My team came to my rescue at about 5 pm. I had sunk so low, the pain in my chest was breaking through the drugs they had given me and I could no longer talk. The only thought in my head was to keep breathing. Breathe in and breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
The doctors and nurses were quickly putting needles and lines into both of my arms and each hand. They were all moving very quickly around me and speaking in hushed voices. I managed to whisper to one of the nurses as she crouched at my bedside and held my hand with great pity in her eyes. She said they were calling my husband to come back – he’d gone home to be with the children for tea. I asked if I was going to die now, and she swallowed hard before saying, ‘Not now’ – but she gave her colleague a look. She was a lovely gentle nurse but no good at telling lies.
The team managed to stabilize me enough to move me to another hospital, where, they said, I would get fixed up. They had arranged for me to have an angiogram, expecting to find a blockage somewhere in my heart that was causing the problem.
An angiogram involves inserting a tube, via a vein in your groin, into the heart. Dye is pumped through the tube and an x-ray shows the blood and oxygen flow and any blockage. If there is a blockage, it can often be cleared by fitting a stent or by performing a bypass.
At this point I was passing in and out of consciousness. I was aware that I was just hanging on, and wasn’t at all sure how much longer I would manage. We arrived at the new hospital, and the surgeon, who had been dragged out of bed, told me all the risks associated with an angiogram and the mortality rate. Even in my perilous state, I could do the maths – and thought there were things I’d much rather have been doing.
The Cath Lab, where they were going to perform the procedure, was very cold and I had to lie on an even colder table to have the angiogram. By this point I was relatively relaxed, partly due to the drugs I had been given but also partly because of what was happening to my body. I was starting to shut down. I felt myself let go a couple of times and it frightened me ... but it was not unpleasant. It would have been very easy just to drift off. I knew my situation was very bad but the thing that surprised me was how calm I was by then.
The surgeon started his procedure, putting a small incision in my groin. I felt the blood trickle over my leg. He then fed the line up into my heart to pump the dye in and x-ray the results. I felt very close to the edge, but I was still quietly determined just to keep breathing. Yet I almost gave up when I heard the surgeon start to swear under his breath. I looked at his face and saw an expression of shock and disbelief and then panic and then nothing. It was when he started to swear that I think I began to understand just how dire my situation was.
Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. The surgeon took off his gloves, then left the room with his shoulders drooped. The nurses and assistants followed quietly as if embarrassed – I was all alone. Everyone really had gone. Upped and left. Gone. I was alone. Completely and utterly alone in this dreadful room on this cold table. I thought for a moment that I was dead and this was what it was like.
I stopped forcing my breath and let my natural breath take over. Each breath was so shallow and light but it was all I could hear in the room. I couldn’t fill my lungs. Was I still alive? I could drift off really easily and when I did the pain in my chest went away. I did it a couple of times to see what it was like. It was fine. Just fine. I would then pull myself back and the hurting returned, but it had turned into a ‘good’ pain because it proved that I was still alive. I really needed that confirmation.
And I really needed to feel the pain. After what seemed like a couple of hours, but which was probably only a couple of minutes, Dogan, my husband, walked into the room. He was sobbing. He said that he loved me. The doctors had told him that I had suffered another massive heart attack; that my heart had sustained a shocking amount of damage, which could not be repaired; and that I was going to die. So as he walked into the lab, he was coming to say goodbye.
I would love to be able to write that I told him how much I loved him and we held each other tight. That didn’t happen. Since I had just discovered that I was still alive, and I’d allowed myself to think for a second about my little ones at home, I was filled with an all-consuming need and desire and passion not to let myself die. I can’t put into words how strong this feeling was. It was this surge of emotion that literally saved my life. It must have been all about the people that I love. It was instinctive and I decided there and then that I would never, ever give up breathing.
I had so much to live for.
What had actually happened to my heart was something so rare that none of the cardiologists that I saw subsequently had ever encountered it before. In fact, it was the reason the surgeon had become so defeated and left me in the lab. My main left artery, the one inside the heart that feeds the heart muscle blood and oxygen, had literally unravelled and fallen apart. The condition is called ‘spontaneous coronary artery dissection’ (SCAD), and is usually diagnosed post-mortem. My artery just simply fell apart, which meant that the blood coming into the heart, instead of being pumped straight out to feed my body, was actually just leaking away. My heart was literally bleeding and being starved of the blood and oxygen that it needed to function, and my body and vital organs were also being deprived. I had just enough output, or blood trickling through, to keep me alive. Just.
The next day, I was wired up to monitors and machines and felt overwhelmed and in a complete state of shock. Nobody can really explain why I survived that night. According to all the medical books, I shouldn’t have. My condition is incredibly rare, with only 200 or so recorded cases worldwide and about 30 survivors – ever! However, I was also fit, a healthy eater and a non-smoker, so this all worked in my favour. I am also a great believer in fate, and with three babies at home I had the most precious of reasons to keep breathing.
I could tell that the doctors were struggling to say something positive to me. But they couldn’t. They believed that although I had survived the heart attacks, my chances of pulling through the next 24 hours were very slim. They were kind and gentle but, in this instance, they couldn’t perform miracles.
The following days passed in a bit of a blur. I couldn’t move, talk, cough or cry without my heart going into melt down. The nursing staff where struggling to understand what was happening to me. The monitor that I was constantly hooked up to couldn’t recognise the rhythms that my heart was getting into, yet it kept coming out of all the little episodes, still ticking! After a few days, I demanded that they wash my hair. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had no chance. I couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom at this stage, so a hair wash was completely out of the question. Let’s just say I have great powers of persuasion, and with a team of doctors and nurses on stand-by ‘just in case’, I was shuffled on my back to the end of my bed, with my head just tipping off the end and my hair was washed. It felt amazing. When my mum arrived bearing my lipstick the following day, I knew I had to continue with this approach to have any chance of a normal life again. But it wasn’t so easy.
Because my heart condition is so very rare, my cardiologists couldn’t find any other survivors that I could talk to. So I was sent home after 2 weeks without any positive prognosis, just a continuing feeling of impending doom and uncertainty. I was scared of everything in the beginning. Absolutely everything. I was afraid to laugh, afraid to cry, to get angry or upset, afraid to shout and love. I was so scared to move too quickly, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t play with my children or go out with my friends. I was afraid to go out of my front door and, at the same time, afraid to stay at home. I couldn’t seem to find a way out of the prison that was now my life. Although my family and friends were happy and pleased to see me back home, they didn’t really understand what I was going through. I don’t think I helped the situation, as I was a great pretender!
When I got a little stronger, but was still struggling to cope with day-to-day things, I would go through a great long process to appear normal to those around me. My eldest son was five years old at this time and he was desperate for me to pick him up from school, just like the other mums, but I couldn’t manage the walk around the block to walk him home as he wanted. So instead, I would spend the entire day getting ready. Washing and drying my hair was a three-hour process, including all the rests I needed in between. Then I would get my mum or husband to drive me round the corner to school, long before any of the other parents arrived. I could sit quietly on the bench in the playground to get my breath back. When the other parents arrived I would smile happily and give everyone a big wave. I could see them wondering what all the fuss was about. They had heard that I was gravely ill, yet here I was looking fine! If only they knew. So my super little chap would run out of school and I would be able to stand up and throw my arms around him and hear all his excitable babble from his day that just had to come out the moment he saw me. Mission accomplished. I was a normal mum for my five-year-old precious boy. I would then sit down while a friend walked Tarik home, and when everyone else left the playground I would quietly be helped back to the car and be driven home. Exhausted.
During the three weeks leading up to my scan, I was incredibly agitated and felt I had to keep myself busy. When I wasn’t crying, I was making arrangements, again, ‘just in case’.
I got all the children’s clothes organised for the following season and gave my girlfriends instructions on where to buy their clothes if I wasn’t around. I taught Dogan how to plait my daughter’s hair, how to measure out the children’s medicine and sign up at school for parents’ evening appointments. I spoke to his friends and told them not to let him turn to the bottle if anything happened to me – and he wasn’t allowed to get involved with any big-boobed blondes who weren’t right for my children! Dark days passed. The day of my scan dawned and, for the first time in three weeks, I was calm – just like the weather. You see the night before I had realised something that blew my mind. I realised that I had got myself into such a state that I was more afraid of living than I was of dying. All this time I had been looking back and not forwards. I had been trying to come to terms with what had happened to me and was just surviving, not living.
Now I was facing the day that my life might end and, it sounds crazy, but it was almost a relief. I suddenly realised that I just couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t continue to live with this constant fear. I didn’t want to live if I was afraid of life. I wasn’t being the mummy I wanted to be to my children, I certainly wasn’t the wife that my husband had chosen to spend the rest of his life with.
Death didn’t seem as scary as a life of fear at this point.
I thought long and hard about my life, or lack of it, and then thought back to the Sally who had demanded her hair got washed while being cared for in a high-dependency unit, and the Sally who made sure she had lipstick on even when she was on the critical list. I felt my blood run cold and my goosebumps jump. OK, if today was the day my life ended, then so be it. Bring it on! I was ready. If I had to die today, then that was my fate. But if there was any chance that I didn’t have this horrible problem in my aorta, then look out world because I was going to get back up and kick its ass! I had suffered a fright, many people do, but I was lucky that I was still here and still breathing. At that moment I made a pact with myself that, if I could get through today, I was going to start living again. But this life had to be one without fear – or I wasn’t interested. I allowed myself to imagine for a moment for that I had a future. I looked forwards and imagined that I did survive another ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years. And do you know what the most frightening part of that daydream was? The scariest part of my future was not living with the fear of dying but living whilst being afraid to live. You may have gathered, simply by the fact that I am able to write this dialogue for you, that I didn’t have an aneurism in my aorta. The news came back that half my heart muscle was damaged and in failure, but the other half was somehow miraculously compensating. The doctors still couldn’t tell me that I’d be OK, but that didn’t matter anymore because I now believed that I had a future and the quality of it was in my hands. I was back in the driving seat. It was still scary, if I’m honest, especially for my family, but it was my life and I wasn’t going to waste another moment.
So moving on, I’m still out there living my life and enjoying every minute. I’m as energetic as I can be, some days more than others. I still have to rest and take good care of myself all the time but this has become normal and I think I absorb it pretty well now. I am on an aggressive drug regime (and will be for the rest of my life), which, in turn, can affect my kidneys and liver but, so far, my body is coping really well with everything I throw at it. My cardiologists are still happily amazed with my progress and, considering the damage my heart has suffered, my power output is fantastic. They cannot explain why I have recovered so well. I can. I put everything down to the food that I eat and the way that I move.
Extra Information
Sally’s qualifications
Certified Cognitive Behavioural Therapist
NHS Accredited Expert Patient
Certified Nutritional Therapy Diploma (NTEC)
Sally’s Charity Roles Include:
Ambassador for Heart Research UK
Ambassador for The Patients Association
Patron for Evesham Cardiac Rehab
Fund-Raiser for SW-HEART
Before children, Sally completed drama and theatre training at Mountview Theatre School, London and went on to act in hundreds of episodes of TV shows such as Peak Practice, The Bill, Pulling Power and many commercials.
