I am continuing to have the obvious symptoms of cardiac asthma that I’ve been having, although at this point I feel them more — the pressure on my chest that is surprisingly not my lungs (I know, right?), and more prevalent. When I take some of the medication that I’ve been prescribed or told to take, I don’t feel it severely, and sometimes not even all the time. Once the kids go on break from occupational and speech therapies, I’m going to call my primary care physician and ask for a referral to a cardiologist provided that I don’t need to seek emergent care sooner than that. Knowing me, I’ll be referred right back to the main hospital in this city for testing unless the cardiologist can do almost all or all of the testing in his office.

But thirty-somethings “don’t get” heart problems, even if they have a first-generation family history of them.