Ashley Marvel said she thought she had very bad indigestion, but what she was feeling back in late October was really something much worse.

Marvel, 41, is a Lewes native and a server at Rose & Crown on Second Street in Lewes. She said the pain built up over a couple of weeks until it was overwhelming.

“One day I was working a double shift and I had to sit down because it hurt so bad,” she said.

Marvel missed a few days of work, struggling with off-and-on chest pains and shortness of breath.

Finally, she went to a Beebe Healthcare urgent care, where they told her her blood pressure was high and EKG abnormal. 

Marvel checked herself out, but went to the Bayhealth urgent care on Route 9 that same day.

“[Bayhealth] wanted to send me to Kent General. I was like, ‘I’m not doing that. I don’t know anybody up there,’” she said. “They let me sign out, but said, ‘Go straight to Beebe, don’t stop.’ I did stop at my house to pack a bag because I knew I would be admitted.”

She said things started to move fast when she got to the hospital. Dr. Jude Ediae saw Marvel in the ER and knew her case was very serious.

“She was a 10 out of 10. At first, I would have said she was an eight, but testing showed it was even worse,” Ediae said.

Ediae rushed Marvel into the catheterization lab, where he implanted a stent and saved her life.

“Her widow-maker was 100% clogged. The other [two main arteries] were 80% to 90% clogged, so she basically had no blood flow to the heart,” Ediae said. “I intervened and that helped, thank God. She is very lucky. She was functioning, but if she had gone to work, like many people, she could have gone into cardiac arrest and died on the spot.”

The widow-maker refers to the left anterior descending coronary artery, which supplies blood to a large portion of the heart.

“They determined I did have a heart attack,” Marvel said.

Ediae said Marvel did not have any significant damage to her heart, even though she may have waited too long to go to the ER.

Marvel admits she was at high risk for a heart attack. 

“I had bad health habits over my lifetime – smoker, bad diet. A lot of women don’t make it, but maybe [I did] because of my age, because I’m younger,” she said.

Ediae said symptoms of a heart attack can often be different in women.

“Women can have a variety of symptoms – chest pain, jaw pain, shortness of breath – but they often don’t have chest pain; they just have dizziness or they just don’t feel good,” he said.

He said, in any case, don’t take over-the-counter-medication hoping the symptoms will go away.

“Take four baby aspirin and go straight to the ER. The worst thing you can do is not go,” Ediae said.

Marvel is going back to Beebe to have more stents put in. She could end up with five or six, according to Ediae.

She said she is making lifestyle changes so she can be here for her daughter, who is in college.

“What’s more important, having a horrible diet and smoking cigarettes, or seeing your daughter get married? I want to see her succeed better than what I did, so I want to be here a little longer,” Marvel said.