Why heart attacks don’t spare women: ‘I thought it was an anxiety attack but docs told me my heart was working at only 30 per cent’

A few months ago, Savita Rana, 58, woke up with cold sweat, feeling uncomfortable and anxious at 2 am. Her heart was racing; she had chest pain and was feeling faint. “I felt nauseous, my stomach rumbled as if I had diarrhoea. I wondered if I had an anxiety attack but that was the first signal that everything was not right with my heart,” she says.

Savita’s daughter Swati, a psychologist, decided to check her blood pressure afterwards and found it to be normal. “I assumed she had an anxiety attack since she was under a lot of stress being my father’s primary caregiver. He was recovering from a brain stroke and kidney disease. Focussing on him, we ignored her condition till her symptoms showed up again, luckily at the hospital while visiting our father,” says Swati. Tests showed she had ha