Most people wait for chest pain to check their heart, but stress tests miss early blockages. Your body reroutes blood around them, so you feel fine until the disease is severe. By then, you often have multiple advanced blockages.
And then they find out, oh my gosh, there's multiple severe blockages. Well, that didn't occur the day before, the week before, the month before, the year before. Slowly progressed. Waiting for symptoms, waiting till you flunk a stress test never ever detects early disease. It really detects very, very advanced, extensive disease. And that's why people can have no symptoms or maybe start having some chest pain. They get worked up. They don't die as their first symptom, which is good. They get worked up, maybe go see a cardiologist, have a stress test, whatever. And then they find out, oh my gosh, there's multiple severe blockages. Well, that didn't occur the day before, the week before, the month before, the year before. Slowly progressed. Your body will, even in the setting of some blockages, will redirect blood flow around them so you don't have symptoms. And then by the time you do have symptoms, it's really, really quite, quite extensive.
