
Sudden fatigue can be caused by a number of things including lack of sleep, medication, anemia, heart/pulmonary problems, cold/flu, etc.
When ShantaQuilette Carter-Williams began feeling abnormally fatigued, she thought she was coming down with the latter. At the time, she was experiencing nausea, vomiting, light chest pain and shoulder pain on her right side.
“I remember telling a coworker I think I’m coming down with the flu. I’m going to go ahead and go home. And my husband was aware of me having these issues and asked me several times if I needed to go to the hospital and I was like no. I think I’m going down with the flu. I’ll rest,” Carter-Williams shares.
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Divine intervention
Although Carter-Williams’ husband was heading to work, he still managed to do what she describes as “divine intervention” by telling her daughter to take her to the emergency room despite her resistance.

By the time Carter-Williams’ daughter came downstairs to take her to the hospital, she was experiencing jaw pain that was shooting down her jaw to her left arm.
When she arrived at the hospital, doctors gave her nitroglycerin and performed an EKG.
“…The doctor kind of looked at me. First, he was in a jovial mood, and then when he came back in, the mood had changed and that’s when they let me know that I was having a heart attack,” Carter-Williams recalls.

After spending a few days in the hospital, Carter-Williams was discharged with no medication to prevent another situation.
“When I started having the fluttering in my chest, I was very active, I was small, I was below my BMI, I was exercising. I was doing everything right. I had just lost a significant amount of weight so I felt like I was in tip-top shape for my age and didn’t know of any heart issues that I had–that my family had or anything like that so it wasn’t really a reason for me to question the medication,” she adds.
However, Carter-Williams, who has a history of being dismissed by doctors, began to feel like something was wrong when she was still experiencing heart problems despite avoiding the things that triggered them.
“I’m like OK I’m not exercising. I’m not elevating my heart like I was before. I’m not doing all these things that you would think were triggering these chest pains but they were still happening and so it was like the information that I was providing to the doctors would