As she sat down on the toilet, pain jolted through Raquel Hutt’s left arm. “I got crazy shooting pains down my left arm and screamed,” the 24-year-old from New York City tells TODAY.com. “I was in so much pain. I was ripping my clothes off. I was cold sweating, then I was curled in a ball on my bed.”
Her mom, Jenny Hutt, called an ambulance immediately. But the EMTs dismissed Hutt’s pain as a panic attack. Still, Hutt pressed them to take her to the hospital where she learned she had a heart attack. She shared her story in a series of TikToks and hopes that her experience encourages others to speak up about their health.
“It’s so important to advocate for yourself and also to understand what’s going on in your own body,” she says.
Not a typical patient
On Aug. 9, Hutt was visiting her mother when she went to the bathroom, and she experienced intense and unusual pain in her left arm. At the time she had no idea what was happening. “I was screaming in pain,” she says. “My mom always takes everything seriously, so she called the ambulance within 45 seconds.”
About seven minutes later, EMTs arrived and “completely invalided” Hutt. “(They said) I was panicking and made me walk from my mom’s apartment all the way through the building,” she says. “She’s on the fifth floor.”
After loading her into the ambulance, she received an IV and an EKG that appeared to be normal. Still, Hutt knew something was very wrong because of the heightened pain she was experiencing. As she screamed, she swore, and the EMTs scolded her for her language. Hutt was stunned by how they treated her.
“It really shocked me how the EMT just looked at me — because of my age and because of my body type and because of the history I was explaining — like I was perfectly healthy,” she says.
When she arrived at the emergency room, staff took her blood and gave her aspirin, a muscle relaxer and a few pain medications. When her tests returned, doctors noticed Hutt experienced heightened levels of troponin, a protein in the heart muscle’s cells, according to the National Library of Medicine. Elevated troponin levels indicate the heart is damaged and doctors can use this measure to diagnose heart attack.
“Everybody sprung into action,” Hutt says. “They were testing my troponin like every 20 minutes and as they were testing it, it went up and up and up.” While doctors suspected she experienced a heart attack, they did not diagnose her with one until after extensive testing that took several days.
“They knew it was something going on with my heart, some sort of heart trauma,” Hutt says. “They moved me to the (cardiac care unit) after my troponin kept going up and up and up because that was indicative of a heart attack.”
Hutt spent four days in the hospital undergoing tests. Doctors — and Hutt — felt stumped that a a healthy 24-year-old experienced a heart attack. Hutt enjoys exercise, sometimes working out two times a day. There’s no family history of heart troubles either.
“We’re still in the process of figuring out exactly why,” she says. “We recently found something called a (patent foramen ovale) PFO, which is … a moderate to large hole in my heart.”
It’s also possible that Hutt experienced spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), which is when a tear in the artery wall occurs, per the Mayo Clinic. It’s considered an emergency because it can cause heart attacks, irregular heart beats or sudden death. So far testing doesn’t seem to indicate SCAD for Hutt, though she’s following up with another doctor to be certain.
“I am going to see the SCAD leading expert … to rule out as much as we can,” she says. On Sept. 17 doctors will repair the PFO in her heart to lessen the chance that Hutt experiences future problems. In a minimally invasive procedure, doctors will snake a catheter through a blood vessel in the groin to the heart. Then a special device will be inserted into the heart to close the hole to prevent any future health troubles, such as stroke.
“PFOs are related to strokes,” she says. “The blood clot goes to your brain. It’s like lightning striking that it went through to my heart.”
PFOs do not always cause health problems for people, according to past TODAY.com reporting. In utero, babies have an opening between the upper chambers of their hearts. For many people, these holes close on their own. But for about 25% of people, the opening doesn’t close, the American Heart Association estimates. Often people remain unaware they have one unless they experience a heart attack or stroke.
‘Definitely shocking’
Hutt shared her experience with heart attack and recovery on TikTok, where she blends facts with humor, such as when she quipped that she experienced a heart attack on the toilet, “just like Elvis.”
“When I realized it was a heart attack, which is pretty serious, it was definitely shocking,” Hutt says. “I don’t feel anxious that something’s going to happen to me again.” But she feels cautious. Hutt has been spending time at home with her mom, not exercising or drinking or doing anything that might be too stressful on her body.
“The doctors say that I can start living my life in a more regular way — but it’s hard,” she says. “Sometimes I feel a little melancholy. There’s a lot of science between heart attacks changing your brain chemistry.”
Raquel Hutt took this picture of herself before work the day before she experienced a heart attack. Hutt is taking several medications, including a beta blocker, a cholesterol medicine and baby aspirin. While she’ll need to take the baby aspirin for the rest of her life, she might not need to be on all the drugs forever.
Hutt hopes that people hearing her story realize the important of speaking up when they feel ill. “It’s super important to understand what’s going on (with your health),” she says. “I’m an example that really freaky things can happen. Odds are very low, but things can happen.”
Since sharing her story on TikTok, Hutt has felt less alone.
“Being in a medical situation can be very isolating,” she says. “I’m connecting people who have weird medical things in my comments, and they are so positive and they’re filled with people relating to each other.”