March 13, 2025
The pain Anne Main felt that night was only discomfort, not agony. Imagine her shock when her cardiologist at St. Boniface Hospital later told her having it checked out had saved her life.
Main and her husband, Bob, ran a bed and breakfast near Russell, Manitoba, about four hours northwest of Winnipeg. She was at the B & B one frigid night in February of 2023, cleaning and warming it up for a group of guests they were expecting the next day.
It was -32 C outside. As Main crouched down to stoke the furnace, she felt pain in her chest unlike anything she had ever felt before. It was unusual and persistent but not excruciating.
She finished up, went home, and told Bob something felt wrong. He brought her water and a heated wheat bag.
“We decided I should go to the Russell Health Centre, but I admit vanity kicked in first. I wanted to shower, thinking I might not get a chance to later,” Main remembered. She took an Aspirin then, and the pain went away. She told Bob they could call it off.
Main was uneasy, but still went to bed, checking in with herself overnight. “It didn’t make sense. I eat carefully, never smoke, and don’t drink a lot. I take aqua fitness classes regularly,” she said.
Chest pain returned
The next day, she felt well enough to go to work in the office at Major Pratt School in Russell. It was another freezing morning; she wondered if the weather was all that had been bothering her.
“You have to ring the doorbell at the school to get in – walking up, I saw someone go in ahead of me. Calling out, ‘Hold the door,’ I started to jog and, sure enough, the pain in my chest returned,” she said.
“This time, I went straight to the Russell Health Centre down the road. As soon as I said I was having chest pain, they were on me like bees to honey. I was admitted for several rounds of tests.”
The doctor finally came into her hospital room and told Main she’d had a mild heart attack.
Hearing this shocked Main. She remembered asking him, “You mean I can’t go back to work at the school today?” She was feeling fine by then, but he told her no.
The doctor booked her for an angiogram and surgery at St. Boniface Hospital, adding her to nearly 47,000 patient visits made to the Hospital’s Cardiac Sciences program each year.
This was a Friday, so Main spent the rest of the weekend in Russell Health Centre.
Five stents in surgery
Monday, attendants in an ambulance came to take her to Winnipeg. “When we arrived at the Hospital, my care team there was waiting for me! I felt so cared for, and they showed me such kindness,” Main said.
Soon, it was time for her to have the angiogram, to see what was happening with her heart. It showed the blockages in her coronary arteries were worse than expected. Her St. B cardiologist, Dr. Arjun Gupta, put in five stents to unblock them, threading each from her wrist and up her arm to her heart.
“It took my breath away. I’ve had friends who have died.”
“My sister had a heart attack the month before. She got one stent at that time. So, you can imagine how shocked I was when Dr. Gupta told me he had put in five! I couldn’t believe my ears,” she said.
“Dr. Gupta told me, ‘Anne, you are so lucky that you had pain and came to see us at St. B.’ He had put three of the five stents into my main coronary artery. If it had become fully blocked, well, they would call that kind of heart attack the widow maker. It took my breath away. I’ve had friends who have died. Could I have been next?”
Main says what scared her the most was that there were no warning signs. She later learned that women can even experience a heart attack without chest pain, as she almost did.
“I am 68 years old and retired, apart from my occasional shifts at the school. In this season of my life, Bob and I have 10, going on 11, grandkids. I want to live!”