A year ago today — tonight, actually — I had a heart attack.

I am writing this on July 18, a year ago to the day that I came close to dying and didn’t know it. The nausea and body chills (serious chills; I was so cold my teeth were chattering), the headache, dizziness, and aching in my jaw were so severe I made my husband call an ambulance.

When I got into it, they hooked me up to all sorts of monitors and quickly surmised although I had zero chest pain, I had suffered a serious heart attack, so serious that they were inquiring if Mercy Flight was available. It wasn’t very long after I got to Strong Memorial Hospital that doctors decided to put a stent in my heart near my aortic valve, which they determined was fused to the next one, the result of a birth defect I never knew I had.

I was not the best of patients,........

© Finger Lakes Times