On July 15, 2021, Juan Pablo Medina began to feel very sick to his stomach while participating in a recording.
“I called the production doctor because I was feeling bad, but I felt the pressure not to stop the filming out of respect for the rest of the team. However, the pain was more. I am lucky that my father is a doctor and I asked to take me with him. I wanted to be by my dad’s side…” explained the actor to GQ Mexico in its April 2022 issue, which has dedicated its cover to him.
Medina’s clinical picture was complicated to throw a critical condition that kept him hospitalized for more than a month, until it was time to decide. The artist says that They suggested saving his life with the only possible solution, amputating, and the longer he took to decide, the more his condition could worsen. He chose to live.
The 44-year-old actor lost a leg and after many months of recovery offers details of what he suffered and concluded with this outcome, which far from making him look weak, shows him as a strong and optimistic man who inspires as he faces this new reality with a good attitude.
Although it seems that there is no such obvious connection between the leg and the heart, the silent heart attack that Medina suffered generated a clot in the heart and this, in the words of the actor, threw clots to all the arteries of the body. “They did a tomography with contrast and they saw that he had clots in the intestine and in his legs. They finally found the definitive diagnosis: he had suffered a silent heart attack”.
The symptoms of this type of heart attack are not common, there may not be chest pain, there may not be shortness of breath, and the infarction may not even be detected until the moment the patient undergoes tests. deeper.
According to Mayo Clinicpeople who have a silent heart attack they can feel the symptoms of indigestion, as in the case of Juan Pablo Medina; also flu symptoms, but just because they are different or seem mild doesn’t mean they are less dangerous. “A silent heart attack, like any other heart attack, involves obstruction of blood flow to the heart and possible damage to the heart muscle,” they specify.
Dr. Deborah Ekery, clinical cardiologist at the Heart Hospital of Austin quoted by the organization’s portal Go Red for Women of the American Heart Association, says he has seen patients in his practice who complain of unexplained excessive tiredness only to discover, through detailed examinations, that they had inadvertently suffered a silent heart attack.
The specialist adds that also it may feel like you have a muscle injury in your chest or back, or you may feel discomfort in your jaw, upper back, or arms. Nausea or dizziness may also appear. The big problem is that all these symptoms can be attributed to other conditions and ignored, but it is possible that the sufferer could have a second heart attack.
Among the risk factors that exist for this cardiac injury are age, being 45 years or older for men and 55 or older for women; being overweight, diabetes, family history of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, low physical activity, and tobacco use.
Acting fast can save you
Dr. Robert Lager, an interventional cardiologist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, tells AARP that in the face of any of these symptoms, it is convenient to act and not wait for us to feel worse. “Time equals muscle… The longer you wait to be examined, the more likely you are to suffer irreversible damage.”
A good way to determine if what we are suffering from is a silent heart attack is to see how the symptoms are perceived with changes in posture or specific actions. Lager suggests checking to see if we can press on our chest, or if we can stand up or sit down, if we relieve a sore arm with a stretch, or if we feel better with a few minutes of rest. “…The heart does not have a gyroscope; you don’t know where you are in space. And it doesn’t matter if you turn the heart upside down or upside down, it will give you the same signals if it has a problem.”
In addition, the specialist explains that the blood thickens when suffering this stress and that is what causes clots after a heart attack. He additionally highlights that People with diabetes, women and the elderly are the most likely to suffer from an attack of this type.
Although it is not possible to determine if we could suffer from a heart attack, these risk factors can be controlled under treatment prescribed by specialists, who are also the people trained to diagnose it.