Dad brought back to life after mistaking silent killer for indigestion

NHS details signs of a heart attack

A dad who mistook a deadly condition for indigestion ended up being brought back to life three times.

Mark Lang, 56, was in Ireland, luckily near Cork University Hospital (CUH), when his life-threatening symptoms began.

“I woke up at 3am and thought I had indigestion,” Mark recalled. “I started to be sick.”

Mark added: “After an hour, I had a shower; I thought that might help me feel a bit better.”

The former amateur rugby league player from Ormskirk, Lancashire, still didn’t feel better.

“I laid down for about 20 minutes, woke up again and the pain was so intense in my hands and jaw; I told Julie I needed to get to hospital.”

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Wife Julie rushed her husband to Cork University Hospital, which was only seven minutes’ drive from the Kingsley Hotel, where the Langs were staying.

Once at hospital, an emergency team swooped in to save Mark’s life, who had suffered from a severe heart attack.

“They came from everywhere,” said Julie. “Doctors, nurses, all the clinicians, anaesthetists, the response was amazing.”

Medics resuscitated Mark three times and prepared him for a life-saving stent insertion.

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Julie reflected: “At home, our local hospital is 20 minutes away. If we were here, Mark could have [had a cardiac arrest] in the car and might not have survived.”

When Mark awoke, the Weighbridge operator remembered being told that he had been “knocking at those gates of heaven”.

Julie told LancsLive: “It obviously wasn’t his time to go.”

Mark spent three weeks at CUH’s coronary care unit and had a fitting of an ICD (defibrillator) and pacemaker at Spire Hospital in Manchester.

Further care was provided by Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital.

Now lives with a heart function rate of 27 percent, but has a “true appreciation” of what medical staff do.

Heart attack symptoms

The NHS lists heart attack symptoms as:

• Chest pain – a feeling of pressure, heaviness, tightness or squeezing across your chest
• Pain in other parts of the body – it can feel as if the pain is spreading from your chest to your arms (usually the left arm, but it can affect both arms), jaw, neck, back and tummy
• Feeling lightheaded or dizzy
• Sweating
• Shortness of breath
• Feeling sick (nausea) or being sick (vomiting)
• An overwhelming feeling of anxiety (similar to a panic attack)
• Coughing or wheezing.

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