A grandmother had a horror holiday experience when she suffered a heart attack - which she had mistaken for bad indigestion. Tina Murphy, 58, was in Marrakesh with her partner John, 54, when she started getting chest and arm pains.
She dismissed it as indigestion but, as the day went on, she realised it wasn't going away. Concerned John, a labourer, asked for help at the hotel reception and a doctor was dispatched - who said Tina needed urgent care.
She was then taken to hospital under blue lights, where she remained for a week while having a procedure and stents fitted. Tina, a community development officer is now well - but says she still worries about another attack. She said: "I have had a fear over the last few years thinking, 'Could today be the day, when I won't be as lucky?'.
"It has been very difficult to deal with."
Tina and John were having breakfast during their November 2019 trip when she started having pains. She said: "It just felt like bad indigestion. I had an ache in the arm.
"I had some Gaviscon and mint tea, thinking I was blocked up or it was heartburn. When I got told I was having a heart attack I was so annoyed, as daft as it sounds.
"It was like, 'Why has it happened to me?'. I have a history of heart problems in my family but I thought I had got away with it."
"The pain then stopped for an hour or so and we had a game of shuffleboard. But it kept coming back and it would come back more intense.
"It wasn't until the late afternoon that the pain got worse, it was getting tighter and then the chest pain was getting worse. Around 4:30pm I could feel a sensation going up my neck.
"But I couldn't relate any of this to a specific symptom of something and kept wondering why I was getting it."
Tina, a gran-of-three, went to their room for a lie down while John went to the reception to ask for someone to check on his wife. A doctor then came out, gave Tina a check-up - and phoned for an ambulance to take them to the hospital.
She said: "I turned to John and said, 'I am going to feel like a right fraud'. But he told me it doesn't matter if there is nothing wrong with me, I just need to be looked at.
"When we got to the hospital they did an ECG, a heart scan and took bloods. But nothing came up either on the ECG or the heart scan.
"They put me in a side ward and said they would come and check on me in 30 minutes."
But, while they were waiting, Tina's pain then came back - more severely - and she started sweating. John rushed for medical help and his partner was taken into an assessment room.
Tina said: "I still had no clue what was going on. They wheeled me out of the room and told my partner I was very poorly and he couldn't come into the room.
"When we got in, I started to hear them all talking and they started talking about stents. At that point, I knew I was having a heart attack."
Tina's main artery was closed, so she had an angioplasty procedure. This uses a balloon to stretch open a narrowed or blocked artery - and had three stents fitted.
Tina remained in the hospital for a week before being discharged.
