New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: I knew I was headed for a heart attack

Tell HN: I knew I was headed for a heart attack
15 by AnimalMuppet | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I'm not overweight (OK, I should lose 10 pounds). I'm in decent shape. And yet, I just had two stents put in my heart, because one coronary artery was 90% blocked and one was 80% blocked. How did I know to start looking for that kind of problem? It's pretty simple. A doctor told me "Your physical performance falls off slowly, over decades. That's not what you're looking for. When it drops off quickly, over a week or two, that's what you're looking for." And that's what happened. I play ultimate frisbee. One day I realized, "Hey, I'm more winded than I was two weeks ago. And it's taking me longer to recover from being winded." So I got a stress echo test on my heart[1]. That showed "abnormal motion of the heart muscles under stress". Translation: the arteries couldn't feed enough oxygen to part of my heart when it was having to beat really hard. Note well: This is not the only way to tell. Pay attention to other things, too (especially to crushing pain in your chest). But if you see this kind of drop-off in your physical performance, don't ignore it. ----- [1] This is an interesting test. They take some ultrasounds of your heart, then run you on a treadmill until your heart rate reaches 90% of your theoretical maximum, then take some more ultrasounds. One part that hackers might appreciate: During the ultrasounds, they told me to take a deep breath, then let it out, then stop. Eventually I asked why. Turns out they're trying to shoot an ultrasound beam between my ribs to the heart, and they have to get the spacing between the ribs to line up with the part of the heart that they're trying to see. So they use my lung volume to change the spacing. I thought that was very clever.