Heart attack is not always that is something gradual. Much like aneurysm, this form of medical circumstance is also sudden. However, unlike aneurysm, you can survive the sudden onslaught of chest plain due to arterial blockage. What you need here is a bit of endurance and rapid response.
Imagine yourself walking Timmy the dog down the road; the road is empty with nothing between you and nature. All of sudden, you feel pain on your left hand and then, there is sudden feeling of a pain that can only be compared to your heart being ripped from the chest using a tractor. This is my friends, is a heart attack. While if you have people around, your survival has a sudden sense of surety, what would happen if there are no people around, only Timmy the dog? What would you do then?
Your survival depends upon your will to live as well
Needless to say, the matter of heart attack is no joke. The pain that defines the symptoms of heart attack can be varied, but all of them can be fatal. To that end, it is necessary that you should endure the pain, at least for a while. With this mind, the following are the steps that you should keep in mind if you are to survive the sudden heart attack:
Call for help:
If there are people around, calling for help can come pretty easily. However, when you are alone, this one step becomes two. Why? Because prior to calling for help, you need to make your situation somewhat stable.
- The first step is to find a place where you can relax. This first step is of an utmost importance. Because if you are not stable, you are not thinking straight.
- Therefore, if you are in a room when the attack happens; you should find a sofa and lie there to make yourself a bit more comfortable.
- However, if you are in a car, you need to be a bit tricky when it comes to that. In this circumstance, you should find an open road and park your car where you feel is the safest.
- The second step entails you calling for help, keep the number for such circumstances at all times and call the ambulance for help. Or, if you are at the vicinity of someone you know and cares about you, you should call them for assistance.
Dealing with the waiting period:
Now that you have called, comes the tough part about endurance and the waiting period. Remember when it was said that patience is virtue? Well, this saying means nothing when your life is on the line. The pain would be great and most of the time, you would be on the verge of passing out. What you need to do here is to look for a way to relieve the pain. Intense pain relievers might be a detriment here. Therefore, take a light aspirin in this situation so that your body is comfortable. This minor levity from the pain would assist you following through the next step.
Stay really still:
The more you move the more is the chance the blood is going to build around the area of the arterial rupture. Therefore, find a way to be absolutely still. While the aspirin in the previous case might help under this circumstance, it is better if you find a way to relax yourself and be still without it. Yes, the pain would be insurmountable, but you can find some middle ground in this matter and stop the pain to be elevated. It might seem a lot to do considering much of the faculties of the bodies can get compromised at this point, but you have to push through and not exert yourself under any circumstance.
Things not to do during the waiting period
While we have comprehensively discussed that staying still is the most important part, there are almost always circumstances where the pain is too great that mistakes are made and an already dangerous condition is make even fatal. Keeping this in mind, following are the things that you must not ever do while you are still in the waiting period:
Abstain from coughing repeatedly:
This one falls under the primary things that one should not do. There is a myth regarding his matter of heart attack that states that during the attack, coughing might help improve the heart rate. Well, no it does not. While this case might true when there is a slight arrhythmia, this is so not the case with heart attack.
Applying pressure on the chest is a bad idea:
Applying pressure on the chest during any sort of pain is pretty much the first reaction. However, in the case of heart attack, this form of administration is pretty much useless because unless the heart has stopped beating, an amateur CPR is not the way to go.
Don’t move at all:
While you have to somewhat move in order to make sure that your body is in a comfortable position. You should try not to move. The sudden movement can do a lot more damage than you might think. Therefore, try not to move at any rate once you have settled in.
While the above measure will assist you in surviving the painful ordeal until help arrives, it is always better to look for the warning signs of heart attack beforehand. Being vigilant is always the key to the factor of survival especially when your heart is in trouble, literally!
Conclusion
You can survive the vicious onslaught of heart attack when you are alone, provided that you remember the three basic keys: your will to survive matters, you should be patient and you should be able to endure. The entireties of the steps that you are going to take to ensure your survival until help arrives are based on these three keys. Always remember, you WILL survive it.
Author Bio:
I am Gaurav Mahajan, a content writer by profession and a yoga aficionado by interest. I love to write articles related to medical topics.