TikTok user shares story after suffering heart attack at age 22: ‘Scary experience’

After having a heart attack in his early 20s, a young British man has issued a warning to others, telling them to “be careful”.

In a video that has since gone viral on TikTok, earning over 1.8 million views, Tom Birchy has recalled the moments before he had a heart attack when he was only 22 years old.

Admitting he was a recreational drug user and working a “high-stress job in the music industry”, Birchy said he first noticed something was wrong when he felt a “tingling sensation” in the back of his wrist. Moments later, the feeling had spread through his entire left arm and left his right arm “numb”.

“I remember being so uncomfortable - it was like both my arms were super-tight, and then my chest went tight as well,” he told his followers in the short video.

A young British man who had a heart attack in his early 20s has warned people to “be careful” because it can happen at any age. Photo / Instagram

Continuing to say it “wasn’t particularly painful”, he confessed the moment left him with a “pressing fear” and an impending sense of doom.

After a few minutes, Birchy said he “couldn’t lie down or stand up” and was “thrashing around the place”, resulting in an ambulance being called, with paramedics performing an electrocardiogram (ECG) — which is a simple, non-invasive test to record the heart’s electrical activity.

At the time, paramedics claimed the man had not suffered from a heart attack but continued to take him to hospital, where he was admitted and more tests were run.

“I remember being just sat there by myself in a normal waiting room, and someone comes running to me and saysm ‘Right, come here’,” he explained, adding, “They took me to a room and jabbed a thing into my stomach, and at that point, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, why am I being injected in my stomach?’.

Birchy continued, saying after he was admitted to a ward, he received news that he did in fact suffer a heart attack, “[I] later that evening found out that I did have a heart attack, aged 22”.

Describing the situation as a “scary experience”, he warned users of the video-sharing app to “be careful” as it’s something that anyone at any age could experience.