Heart failure
The heart does not pump strongly enough to meet the body's demand.
When to seek care
Go to the emergency room if breathlessness is severe or keeps you from lying down, if there is chest pain, or if you gained two kilos or more in a few days with more swelling in your legs. Book a visit if you tire during activities you used to manage easily, or if you need more pillows to sleep.
What it feels like
- Shortness of breath when walking or lying down
- Swelling of feet and ankles
- Fatigue out of proportion to effort
- Waking at night feeling unable to breathe
Heart failure does not mean the heart has stopped: it means it can no longer move blood at the rate the body asks for. The consequence builds up wherever fluid backs up, and that is where the two classic symptoms come from - breathlessness and swollen legs.
The most telling symptom is its relationship to posture. A patient who needs two or three pillows to sleep, or who wakes suddenly unable to breathe, is describing a heart that cannot handle fluid returning when lying flat.
This is a condition that is managed, not improvised. Daily weight, dietary salt, and sticking to the medication regimen determine the number of hospital admissions more than anything else.
And that is why you wake suddenly unable to breathe
If breathlessness keeps you from lying down, that is not something for the next appointment: it is an emergency.
The container is not a drawing of the body and it is not to scale, and the band does not say how much fluid there is: all the diagram states is where it goes depending on posture, and that can be checked on the drawing itself. It draws no pillows, no weights, no figures.
- 01
- Standing, fluid pools at the bottom
- 02
- Lying down, it comes back to the chest