I'm doing okay now, just a little tired. I came into the office today for a little while, and thought I'd drop this message to the forum. Maybe some others here who have had a heart attack will care to comment.

All I really want to get across to ya'll is to pay attention to your body and what its trying to tell you. It is a short step through the door to the other side. Don't expect a heart attack syndrome to follow a script. They don't. I hardly had any of the "classic" symptoms.

Last Thursday morning at about 3:30 I was jolted from my sleep by powerful pains in both my right and left forearms. The pain was akin to the kind of muscle aches you get when you're doing physical labor in extreme cold. There was no shortness of breath, no sweating, no nausea, no chest pain. There was severe overall discomfort, and the pain in my forearms. My blood pressure was 179/128. I took two 325 mg. aspirin at 4:00AM, then two more at 7:00. I could find no particular thing wrong except for the arm pain that was beginning to ebb a little, so I went to work.

After leaving a client's office at around 9:00AM the arm pain returned, to a lesser degree than before, and I started feeling an unfocused area of tension in my chest. I began to feel an ache under the point of the collar bone on the left side, and a deep feeling of apprehension swept over me. I pulled over and called my doctor who advised me to get to the emergency room, post haste.

I parked at another client's office and called 911.

While transporting me to the ER, the EMT ran an EKG on me. It was normal. The EMT called the ER & they adivsed giving me a nitro glycerin tablet. That's some nasty shit. It BANGS! open your blood vessels all at once. You get a cold sweat, pounding headache, and feel like your going to puke.

At the ER they ran another EKG and pulled a blood specimen. The EKG was normal, but a few minutes later the ER doc came in and said the bloodwork showed that I was having a heart attack. STAT buttons were hit. Two more nitro tablets, getting off my clothes and into one of those ridiculous gowns. The next EKG showed the event. An ER nurse was doing a questionnaire. She asked me that if I needed blood, did I have any religous or cultural prohibitions against it? I told her no, to just make sure its from another White person. Her expression made me laugh in the middle of all this.

The long and short of it is they inserted a catheter through my wrist and into the blocked artery where they performed an angioplasty. They found other arteries that have buildup that we're going to try meds to take care of before we do any by-pass surgery.

The deal is this, if I had waited, if I had gone into denial concerning what was happening to me, I'd probably be dead right now. The doc said it was close. I have a genetic tendency for heart disease, I didn't earn this through a life of self abuse. Being in shape, working out with cardiovascular benefits in mind, all helped, but what saved my ass was engaging the emergency system NOW and rather than later. I'm 52 years old. I still have a lot of fight left in me, and just like we have to be prepared to fight for our race with bullets, bricks, and bombs, we have to be prepared to fight, on a very personal level, for our very lives if we want to be around to fight for our race.