The Definition of Heart Attack

The definition of heart attack (also known as myocardial infarction) is the death of heart muscle from the sudden obstruction of a coronary artery by a blood clot.

Coronary arteries are blood vessels that supply the heart muscle with blood and oxygen. Obstruction of the coronary arteries seize or remove oxygen from the blood and heart muscle, causing injury to the heart muscle. There are wounds of the heart muscle causes chest pain and feeling (sensation) chest pressure.

If blood flow is not restored back to the heart muscle within 20 to 40 minutes, death of heart muscle that can not be restored again, will begin to happen. Muscle continues to die for six to eight hours, at which time the heart attack usually is "fully". Heart muscle that dies eventually replaced by scar tissue.

Approximately one million Americans suffer heart attacks each year. Four hundred thousand of them died, as a result of a heart attack.

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The shoe is on the other foot.

Defibrillator on left; pacemaker on right




Or I'm wearing a different hat. Or, less metaphorically, L is wearing the pale green Fancy Hospital smock today. He's supposed to be out of the operating room at 11:30 am Central Standard Time. Some of you may recall that he has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He is getting a cardioverter defibrillator installed to prevent a life-ending event, as the doctor said. He's supposed to be in the recovery room by 11:30 am CST. The very very worst thing about this is he can't play contact sports, for fear of moving the device, so yesterday was his very last basketball game. He loves basketball. It's his in-the-moment, everything-else-disappears activity. He will have to find another, one where a ball or a person or a floor won't hit him in the defibrillator.

In the waiting area today were three men, all with gray hair, two with paunches and canes, and one who looked diminished. One of the cane men was a patient and the other, his friend. L is in such perfect shape. He doesn't look like the usual cardiac patient.

A nurse told us that a (dreaded) Fellow was going to do the operation along with the Attending (the staff cardiologist). I have a horror of Fellows and interns and residents and medical students. They are real doctors, but they're amateurs. I could feel the difference between a Fellow and an Attending during a biopsy. The Fellow was uncertain and tentative and had to be guided after her first attempt to poke around in my breast. I said we wanted the Attending to do it. I don't know if L was forceful enough with the doctor. He just asked, You're going to do it, right? The nurse had demurred, saying, This is a teaching hospital. Yes, but let them learn on someone else's body. I know this isn't charitable or generous or unselfish. So be it.

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