State Sen. Robert Hooper of northern Harford County was recovering at home after suffering a minor heart attack earlier this week that he initially mistook for indigestion.
A brief operation to reopen a blocked artery was performed Wednesday morning at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, and the 70-year-old District 35 Republican was back to work Friday afternoon.
Hooper said the pain in his chest was never the “stabbing” feeling he typically associated with a heart attack, but rather a steady pressure he mistook for a sign he had been overeating.
“I got to belching and burping, and it went away for a while, so I went back for some more,” Hooper said.
The senator?s symptoms were actually a far more common sign of a heart attack, but movies and television have made most people expect every attack to seem like “the big one,” with stabbing pain and loss of consciousness, said Dr. Stephen Pollock, director of the Heart Institute at St. Joseph Medical Center.
“In most cases, patients don?t even use the word ?pain,?” Pollock said. “The symptoms can be just as minor or just as subtle as what the senator experienced.”
Symptoms can include slight to severe pressure in the chest, discomfort or shortness of breath as soon as the heart stops receiving blood, he said. From there, there are only four to six hours until the heart tissue dies ? making Hooper lucky that he was able to get help in time.
“The first symptom is the last, one-third of the time,” Pollock said.
