A 14-year-old girl who experienced "butterflies" at a school dance was shocked upon later finding out she had survived a heart attack.
Ceirra Zeager had a racing heart when she danced with a boy for the first time at her winter formal and said it continued to pound long after she had returned home.
Ceirra, now 23, told Insider she didn't know what to make of the experience and thought: 'Is this how it is to have feelings?'
But the next morning, the Pennsylvania student's "butterflies" had turned into a deep fatigue and heaviness in her arm.
She attempted to walk to her parent's room for help but had her vision narrow and her ear begin to burn. She then collapsed.
"Before I knew it, I was on the floor," Ceirra said. "It felt like an elephant was on my chest."
When Ceirra's dad saw her on the ground, he asked if the family needed to go to the hospital instead of her brother's birthday party, to which she said yes.
At the hospital, Ceirra said there was little sense of urgency - she waited for hours to be seen and despite having an "intense burning pain" in her upper arm, she wasn't given pain medicine.
She has since learned that arm pain can often be a sign of heart attacks in women.
Eventually, she was seen by a doctor, who told her she likely had "teen anxiety". The news left her embarrassed, she said as her whole family was at the hospital and she felt she was ruining her brother's birthday get-together.
The doctor recommended Zeager visit a children's hospital to be safe and while there, tests identified in or around Ceirra's heart.
She underwent a cardiac catheterisation procedure to identity the location of the clot and woke up from the surgery to see her sister crying.
"You had a heart attack," she told Ceirra.
Ceirra's story comes just days after the British Heart Foundation published a study finding females were 50 percent more likely to be wrongly diagnosed when it comes to coronary problems than men.
Heart attacks killed around 77 British women every day, but many have the incidents dismissed as heartburn, anxiety or ‘a funny turn’.
A study, published in the journal Circulation, also found that indigestion was a common symptom experienced by women in the month leading up to their cardiac event.
Tests Ceirra underwent after doctors correctly diagnosed her found she had elevated lipoprotein A, which found red blood cells were "extra sticky" and had subsequently clotted.
She had also been born with a hole in her heart, called patent foramen ovale (PFO). This had allowed the clot to get lodged in her coronary artery, causing the heart attack.
Although around a quarter of people have PFO, it did not typically cause problems alone. The condition had become dangerous for Ceirra due to her high ipoprotein A levels.
The teen underwent surgery to repair the hole, took blood thinners for six months and was in hospital for several weeks.
About seven years later, she needed open-heart surgery to repair a leaky heart valve that had been damaged during the heart attack.
According to Ceirra, who shared her story with the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women “Real Women” campaign, the attack had left her heart "permanently damaged".
The young woman was now wanting to spread her message, and urged other women to "listen to [their] body" and "advocate for [themselves]".
The aim of the British Heart Foundation study was to accurately describe the women’s coronary heart disease symptoms, to develop a deeper understanding of the warning signs.
The researchers said: "The current description of 'typical' cardiac symptoms is based primarily on the experience of white, middle-aged men.”
But this "contributes to misunderstandings in clinicians and lay individuals, leads to inaccurate diagnosis, and causes women to delay seeking treatment".
They added that in earlier research, they found that between 85 to 90 percent of women reported several different symptoms in the period leading up to a heart attack.
The most common symptoms women identified in the month before the heart attack include:
Unusual fatigue (71 per cent)
Sleep disturbance (48 per cent)
Shortness of breath (42 per cent)
Indigestion (39 per cent)
Anxiety (36 per cent)
During a heart attack women experienced:
Shortness of breath (58 per cent)
Weakness (55 per cent)
Unusual fatigue (43 per cent)
Cold sweat (39 per cent)
Dizziness (39 per cent)
Dr Nancy K. Sweitzer came up with a list of integral factors a person needs to implement into their lives in order to reduce their risk of the potentially life-threatening health condition.
She came up with these five lifestyle factors after citing a similar study from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
Quit smoking for a 36% risk reduction
Eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, reduced-fat dairy, whole grains and fish for a 18% reduction
12% reduction for maintaining a waistline of 37 inches or less for men or less than 35 inches for women
11% reduction for drinking fewer than two alcoholic drinks per day
3% reduction for moderate daily and weekly exercise routines
“It can be overwhelming if people feel they need to make all of these changes at once,” added Dr Sweitzer.
“Everyone could look at where they can make the biggest impact on their risk reduction and start with one small change.”
