A FORMER Glasgow nurse who delayed emergency help because she didn’t want to “burden” NHS staff dealing with Covid-19 cases is lucky to be alive after suffering a massive heart attack.

The damage to Alice Timmons’ heart had left a major artery almost entirely blocked off with only a “pinhole” for blood to flow through.

Alice, 66, a grandmother-of-two from Castlemilk, initially thought she was suffering from a simple case of indigestion, which can mimic the signs of a heart attack or be a symptom itself.

But she was persuaded to go to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital after calling her GP - advice which may have saved her life on April 7.

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She was transferred to the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank for specialist, life-saving treatment. 

Earlier this month, the hospital urged people not to delay seeking emergency treatment after doctors revealed they were seeing an increase in people contacting them with advanced cardiac symptoms.

Staff at the QEUH have also reported seeing less patients with cardiac symptoms since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alice said: “I feel incredibly lucky.

“Having worked in the NHS I can appreciate the challenges staff are facing just now and so I didn’t want to add to that – especially because I really did feel it was just indigestion. 

“But I am so glad I was persuaded by my GP to have my symptoms checked out. 

“It makes me very emotional to think just how close I came to potentially not being here. 

“I have two grandchildren who I adore and the idea of not being around to see them grow up, doesn’t bear thinking about.”

”The doctors and nursing staff were wonderful and looked after me so well. “There were very clear procedures in place for suspected Covid-19 patients, with visible demarcations in the hospital and staff taking all precautions. 

“I felt very safe and very secure and I am just so grateful to everyone who helped with my care. “

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British Heart Foundation Scotland says it’s increasingly worried by data which shows the average number of weekly attendances at A&E in Scotland has fallen by more than 50% since the outbreak began. 

Figures from the Information Services Division (ISD) Scotland show that the average number of weekly attendances to A&E in Scotland was 24,550 before the outbreak, falling rapidly to 11,388 after the outbreak.

Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Whilst many things right now are uncertain, one thing that we can be sure of is that heart attacks kill.

“If people put off seeking urgent medical help when they are having heart attack symptoms they put their life at risk. 

A heart attack occurs when one of the arteries to the heart gets completely blocked.

This means the part of the heart supplied by that artery is starved of oxygen-rich blood, and the muscle is at risk of dying without medical help

The most common sign of a heart attack is a severe, constricting, heavy pain in the chest, which can be can be accompanied by nausea, indigestion, heartburn or abdominal pain.