Memphis, TNRay is diabetic. He had been taking Avandia for about a year when his doctor discovered he had heart problems. But it wasn't until he was on the operating table in the hospital, minutes before he was to have stents put in his arteries, that the images revealed the real reason his heart wasn`t working properly.
"I went for a stress test, and the results indicated that my heart wasn't functioning properly," Ray said. "I underwent further testing, and the doctors discovered that my heart wasn't working at the proper capacity – it was functioning at something like 30 percent. So they scheduled me for surgery to have stents put in my arteries. They figured my arteries must be blocked. This was 2003 – 2004.
In 2004 I went in for the surgery. I was lying on the operating table, the doctors were getting ready to do the procedure, and they were looking at a picture of my heart. But they couldn't see anywhere to place the stents. I was in an out of consciousness at the time because of the medications they gave me, but they asked me when I had had my heart attack. I really couldn't tell them, because I didn't know I'd had one. They told me I had definitely had a heart attack, they could see it on the images of my heart. In fact, they gave me the images of my heart to keep--I still have them. So the surgery was cancelled. They never did put any stents in because my arteries weren't blocked. The heart attack had damaged my heart muscle and that's what was causing the problem. But the doctors couldn't tell me when it happened."
Alarmingly, Ray had not had any major warning signs that a heart attack was headed his way. "I had just assumed that when you have heart failure or some heart related event you would have pain in your chest that radiated down your arm. But I didn't have any of those symptoms, no discomfort whatsoever."
While Ray did experience some shortness of breath and swelling of his extremities, he didn't really pay much attention to either symptom. "I noticed them, but I didn't really didn't know what was going on," he said. "The effects were gradual." In fact, there would have been no apparent reason to Ray at the time indicating he should pay attention. Those Avandia side effects weren't common knowledge, as they are today.
It wasn't until May 2007, as a result of a major scientific review of the drug reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, that a range of potentially lethal Avandia side effects became widely publicized. The researchers had found a 64 percent increased risk of heart-related death and a 43 percent increased risk of for heart attack among patients taking Avandia.
Ray was in his late 50s when he suffered his heart attack. While he is lucky to have lived, he is still on medication for his heart and likely will remain on medication for the rest of his life. "I still have shortness of breath and I still retain fluid," Ray said. "I'm not on Avandia anymore. I came off Avandia some months after I was hospitalized, because I was told it was not a very good drug. At that time I didn't know Avandia was connected with these problems. I didn't find out until after everything had happened. I didn't see any alerts about Avandia. I'm assuming that Avandia played a role in my heart attack."