Women should trust their guts when it comes to their health, paramedic says

A former paramedic who suffered three heart attacks after being turned away from the emergency room is urging women to trust their guts.

Kim Forsman went to the hospital in Neepawa with mild heart attack symptoms in 2006.

“I was told because I didn’t really fit the symptoms that cardiac patients had, that I was fine and to go home and take a day off work, and if I had more symptoms, I could see my regular physician,” Forsman said.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "I was told because I didn't really fit the symptoms that cardiac patients had, that I was fine and to go home and take a day off work, and if I had more symptoms, I could see my regular physician," Forsman said.

But her 27 years as a paramedic combined with a history of heart trouble in the past told her to take it more seriously.

“Because I knew, I started popping aspirins like they were Tic Tacs. Two days later, I presented at the hospital in critical condition and was taken in to Winnipeg where I found out I had not only had one heart attack, I had three, and I had a triple heart bypass at the age of 45,” she said.

Forsman said she’s not alone – many other women aren’t taken seriously when exhibiting signs of heart disease.

READ MORE: Heart disease in women is under-diagnosed, under-treated and under-researched: Heart and Stroke report

A report released last week by the Heart and Stroke Foundation shows 78 per cent of women showing symptoms of heart disease are misdiagnosed, and a woman in Canada dies every 20 minutes from heart disease.

“People presented so differently, and especially women,” she said. “We saw cardiac events with abdominal pain, with chest pain, with back pain, with arm pain.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "People presented so differently, and especially women," she said. "We saw cardiac events with abdominal pain, with chest pain, with back pain, with arm pain."

Statistics from the United States, mirrored by Canadian data, show women are far more likely to suffer from heart disease than breast cancer.

In light of her own experience, Forsman has a message for anyone who thinks they are feeling symptoms of heart disease.

“Women need to be heard, they need to be taken seriously and I think women need to trust their own gut instinct,” Forsman said. “If you feel something’s not right, you need to push for investigation, because not all people would be as lucky as I was – to come out of it and be in fairly good health.”