CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Between scheduling holiday travel, preparing the big dinner and seeing your in-laws, the stress of it all, can be dangerous.
The American Heart Association reports more heart attacks happen between Christmas and New Year’s than any other time of year.
3NEWS spoke with Jim Myers, The American Heart Association's regional manager over CPR for the southwest region. He is a survivor himself. Myers was cutting a Christmas tree for his family out in the middle of nowhere when he realized he was experiencing a heart attack.
"Found my trees and was loading them up and just started to get short of breath,” Myers said.
At just 38, Myers didn't want to believe it was something serious.
"I didn't know anything better,” Myers said. “And maybe I'm just short on blood sugar or something like that. But as it all turned out, it wasn't that."
He managed to drive to a clinic in northern New Mexico. A drive that saved his life.
“We do see that heart attacks increase around Christmas and New Year's," said Dr. Travis Taylor, interventional cardiologist with Coastal Cardiology. "And there's a wide variety of reasons why that could be."
Taylor said planning travel and seeing in-laws can cause stress that may snowball into more issues.
“Sometimes people forget their medications at home,” Taylor said. “So it's very important to make a plan for what you are going to do with your medications, and all your other medical devices when you leave home and go on long car rides and plane rides."
There are resources in-town that will teach residents how to save a life. That includes the new hands-on CPR training kiosk at La Palmera mall.
“It's a digital representation of somebody who has suffered a cardiac arrest,” Taylor said. “And they educate you how to do CPR.”
But like Jim Myers, pay attention to your own body, because the life you save just might be your own.
If you would like to test out the new CPR kiosk, it’s located across the new Cheesecake Factory.
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