If this is happening now
Call 108 for an ambulance.
Do not wait to see whether it passes. Do not drive yourself. An ambulance can begin treatment on the way, and the hospital knows you are coming.
If an ambulance cannot reach you quickly, ask someone else to drive you to the nearest hospital with an emergency department. Someone else — not you.
Any one of these is enough on its own. They do not all have to be present, and a heart attack does not always hurt in the way people expect it to.
- 01
Chest pain or heavy pressure
Tightness, squeezing or a crushing weight in the centre of the chest, lasting more than a few minutes — or going away and coming back. It may spread to the arm, jaw, neck, back or upper stomach.
- 02
Sudden breathlessness
Struggling for breath while sitting or lying still, or waking up fighting for air. Especially alongside chest discomfort, sweating, or swelling of the legs.
- 03
Fainting or collapse
Blacking out, or nearly blacking out, without warning — particularly during exertion or while sitting down.
- 04
Cold sweat with nausea
Breaking into a sweat with nausea, vomiting or a feeling of dread, with or without chest pain. This pattern is common in women and in people with diabetes, where chest pain may be mild or absent altogether.
- 05
A very fast, very slow or wildly irregular pulse
Especially together with dizziness, breathlessness or chest discomfort.
- 06
Signs of a stroke
One side of the face drooping, weakness in one arm, or speech that is slurred or makes no sense. Note the time it started — it changes what treatment is possible.
If you are not sure, call anyway. Being sent home after a normal ECG costs you an afternoon. Waiting at home through a heart attack costs heart muscle that does not grow back.
In order. None of this replaces the call — make the call first.
- 01
Stop and sit down
Stop whatever you are doing. Sit on the floor or lean against a wall, so that a faint cannot become a fall. Do not drive yourself, and do not walk to a hospital.
- 02
Unlock the door
If you are alone, unlock the front door and tell someone — a neighbour, a family member — where you are and what is happening.
- 03
Chew an aspirin, if you have one to hand
Chew, rather than swallow whole, a standard aspirin tablet — unless you are allergic to it or have been told not to take it. Do not delay the call in order to go looking for one.
- 04
Do not take medicine prescribed to someone else
In particular, do not take a nitrate tablet or spray that was prescribed to another person. It can drop the blood pressure dangerously.
- 05
Gather what the paramedics will ask for
Your medicine strips, any previous ECG or angiogram reports, and a note of when the symptoms started. Only if somebody else can do it for you.
The Heart Care Center is a consulting room with published hours. Nobody monitors this website, the appointment form or the clinic phone outside those hours, and no reply from any of them should ever be waited on.
Once the emergency itself has been dealt with, the clinic is the right place for what comes next — understanding what happened, reading the discharge summary properly, and deciding what treatment and follow-up should look like from here.