March 19, 2018 -- Christine Shockey suspected she was having a heart attack when she awoke at 2 a.m. with excruciating pain shooting down her left arm.

But it took medical professionals 5 days to figure it out -- a delay that changed her health forever.

Shockey went to the ER to have her pain checked out and told the doctors that 8 days earlier, her 43-year-old sister had a type of heart attack called spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD.

The mother of two living in Council Bluffs, IA, was 42 at the time, a runner with no known health or heart problems.

Doctors did an electrocardiogram (EKG) on Shockey, and the results came back slightly abnormal. A blood test also found some proteins called troponins in her blood that are released when heart muscle is damaged during a heart attack.

Despite this, she says doctors diagnosed her with gastric reflux and anxiety. While they kept her for 2 days, they refused repeated requests by her family to do an angiogram to get a better look at her heart.

She was still having arm pain when she was released, so Shockey went to her primary care doctor. He diagnosed her with shingles -- even though she didn’t have a rash.

With the pain still not going away, Shockey was able to get an appointment with a doctor the next day at the University of Nebraska Medical Center at Omaha, just across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs. When he did an EKG, he immediately announced she was having a heart attack and said she’d been having it for the last 5 days -- since her symptoms started.

He handed her his personal cellphone before rushing her into surgery. “He told me to call my husband and tell him goodbye because he wasn’t sure he could save me,” Shockey says.

Her heart was damaged so much, it couldn't pump the way it should. The main artery to her heart was torn from the top of her heart to the bottom. Although doctors restored blood flow to it by using a stent, her heart never fully recovered.