Ask Dr. K: Time crucial in treating heart attack

DEAR DOCTOR K: Can you tell me what happens when someone having a heart attack gets to the hospital?

DEAR READER: You’re going about your day when you suddenly start to sweat and become short of breath. You feel a crushing pressure in your chest. You think: “This is it. I’m having a heart attack.”

A heart attack occurs when one of the coronary arteries becomes fully or partially blocked. The blood carries nutrition – oxygen, sugar and other molecules – that every tissue needs to survive. Any tissue that is completely deprived of a blood supply dies. That includes the heart muscle.

If you think you may be having a heart attack, call 911. Don’t ask a friend or relative to drive you to the hospital. An ambulance will take you to the emergency department.

When you arrive at the ED, the staff have three immediate challenges: They need to assess how sick you are; they need to collect information to make the diagnosis: Are your symptoms caused by a heart attack or by another condition? And they need to give you treatments to relieve your suffering and to minimize the heart damage, if you are indeed having a heart attack.

The ED staff will immediately check your pulse and blood pressure and will take your electrocardiogram. They also will take a blood sample for various diagnostic tests.

If you are having a heart attack, the doctors will start an intravenous line so that they can rapidly give you medicines. They will hook you up to a heart monitor to identify the development of dangerous heart rhythms. Finally, they usually will give you oxygen, aspirin and possibly other medicines to minimize heart damage.

As soon as you are stable, you’ll be encouraged to sit up and then stroll the halls. This helps keep blood clots from forming and begins to strengthen your heart.

It sounds frightening. But if you have a heart attack and reach the hospital in time, chances are very good that you will survive – and walk out of the hospital within a week.