Outwit The Widowmaker

It’s the deadliest heart attack there is and can strike seemingly healthy guys without warning. Here’s how to avoid getting hit

- Richard Laliberte

MARLIN MOWERY WAS PARTICIPATING in a new employee health and wellness program for his company when he had a heart attack. It was his first meeting of a two-day workshop, and he had done one of the program’s morning workouts an hour earlier. “At 9:05, I broke into a tremendous sweat,” he recalls. “There was water literally running off my fingers.”

Although the operations manager was slightly overweight, out of shape, taking medication for high blood pressure and eating meals on the go, he figured he was just extremely fatigued. After all, he was only 50. It couldn’t be a heart attack.

So he powered through the rest of the day despite persistent sweating, nausea and then pain in his back and ribs at night. By morning he felt so weak he could barely lift his laptop, and he finally headed to an urgentcare clinic. When an EKG discovered a massive heart attack in progress, an ambulance rushed him to hospital, where doctors cleared a blockage in one of his coronary arteries.

“You should be dead right now,” an amazed cardiologist said. Only in recovery did Mowery learn exactly what had happened. He’d just survived the mother of all heart attacks: the widowmaker.

Any heart attack can be fatal, so the widowmaker isn’t unique in that respect. What makes it notable (and feared) is where it occurs: in the left anterior descending artery. The LAD provides blood and oxygen to the entire front of the heart – a larger area than other coronary arteries supply. A clog in the LAD cuts off about 40 per cent of the heart’s blood. No other blockage in any other artery affects that much acreage.