A fit and healthy Dublin man in his 50s, who walked 25,000 steps a day, was shocked when he suffered from an unsuspected heart attack last week.
Now, Cathal Burke suspects that his symptoms were masked by long Covid after he attributed his recent feelings of fatigue to the after-effects of the virus.
Speaking to the Irish Mirror, the 51-year-old recounted how he suddenly started experiencing chest pains while he was at home alone in his girlfriend’s apartment.
“I was watching something on Netflix and I got some pains in my chest and a tingling feeling in both arms,” he said.
“That was going on for a while and it was bugging me, I didn’t know what it was. I then went into the bedroom and was lying down.
“I started sweating, losing consciousness, I could feel my eyes closing and I couldn’t get to my phone.”
He did eventually manage to reach his phone but could barely remember the ‘999’ number to ring an ambulance.
Luckily, the ambulance arrived in 15 minutes and he was rushed to James Hospital, with a suspected blocked artery, where a team of doctors was waiting for him.
Cathal had three stents put in his heart and later found out from doctors that he had suffered a Type One heart attack.
It came as a big shock as he had suffered from no previous major health issues, apart from noticing his blood pressure was high on one occasion when his girlfriend checked it for him.
He had a very active day-to-day life, walking for hours every day in his job, working as a freelance photographer for a news agency around Dublin.
“I would have been very fit, especially when I was working around town,” he said.
“Pre-Covid, I would have been fairly zooming around. I would have been one for salads and juices. I would have been fairly fit. I was doing 20,000 to 25,000 steps a day.”
However, he had contracted Covid in March 2020 followed by long Covid and experienced extreme spells of tiredness for no reason, which he now knows was likely due to the lack of blood flow caused by his clogged arteries.
“Looking back there were probably little signs,” he said.
“With the whole entertainment industry gone, I wasn’t working so I was sleeping some days till about 11-o-clock and then I’d get up and I’d be back in the bed a few hours later. I was constantly fatigued.
“It was constant tiredness but what was happening was my arteries were blocked and there wasn’t proper blood flow.”
Since his stint in hospital, he has also discovered that he had a hidden symptom of high cholesterol - which can increase the risk of heart attack.
Cathal was also adopted and he doesn’t have his biological family’s health records, which can provide clues to hereditary cardiac disorders, so he wasn’t aware that he could be at a higher risk.
He is back home now in the care of his girlfriend after spending a couple of nights in the cardiac care unit in Tallaght Hospital, where he was transferred to recover after his heart attack and stent surgery.
Cathal urged other people not to ignore the early warning signs that could cause a heart attack such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or unexplained fatigue and to get checked out by a doctor.
His road to recovery now includes taking medication of seven tablets a day and he will soon undergo heart rehab which he hopes will help him get back to walking 25,000 steps a day.
“At the moment I can only really go out for a five minute walk," he said. "I’ll build it up each day and hopefully get back to the levels I was at before.”
