There were 14 steps in nurse Anita Williams Rock's house. She'd hardly noticed them before, and then one day she began to feel every step.

It was the same with her morning walk. The 51 year old now had to frequently stop and catch her breath, all the while feeling pressure on her chest. "When I went to work the next day, I called my doctor to book a stress test," said Mrs. Rock who is a nurse in Dr. Niall Aitken's office. "The doctor was away, so I told his nurse to book it in three weeks."

Mrs. Rock went into a state of denial and chalked the whole thing up to indigestion. It was a full two weeks before she admitted to herself that the fatigue was getting worse, not better. Eventually, her husband took her to the emergency room, and she was diagnosed with a blockage in her heart.

"After doing various tests, the cardiologist came in and said they would have to fly me out for an angiogram," said Mrs. Rock. "I had a choice of hospitals and I chose Johns Hopkins. "Angiograms are basically x-ray pictures of blood vessels. They don't do angiograms here. Here they stabilise you to fly you out. It is a dangerous procedure because they are putting a catheter into the femoral artery."

Mrs. Rock was grateful to have her husband and best friend beside her when she found out she had to go away for treatment.

"I was a little bit tearful, not so much because I had a blockage," said Mrs. Rock. "It was more because I wasn't in control. The doctors and nurses at King Edward were all very good. They gave me further treatment until the air ambulance arrived and then off we went. We arrived at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore at 11 p.m."

At Johns Hopkins the doctors found that one of her arteries was ninety percent blocked and another was fifty percent blocked. They tried to put a stent in to open up the vessels, but did not succeed, so Mrs. Rock had to have a heart bypass. A bypass is when a doctor redirects, or 'bypasses' blood around blocked arteries to improve blood flow and increase oxygen to the heart. Mrs. Rock's surgery lasted five and a half hours.

"I had a lot going for me," said Mrs. Rock "For example, I have never had high blood pressure. I was also relatively young, 51. I am now 53 years old, so all went well."

Before the operation Mrs. Rock was not a smoker and not particularly overweight. The only warning sign was an elevated cholesterol level, which she had been working on.

"I didn't feel pain," she said, "I only felt pressure. It felt like someone pressing on my sternum. Some people get pain in their scapula (the part of your back behind your heart), jaw pain or pain radiating down the arm. I know of one patient who had pain in their elbow. I know a 61 year old who just went to his doctor for a normal physical and found out he had a blockage. He hadn't had any pain or pressure at all."

After the operation, it took Mrs. Rock a long time to heal, because the bones of the sternum had to be cut and then wired back in place, in order for the doctors to get to the heart. One thing that helped Mrs. Rock get her life back to normal, but on a more healthy track was the Cardiac Care programme at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. "I did go through the cardiac care programme," said Mrs. Rock. "Not everyone goes, but I would definitely recommend it. We had persons in there with extremely high blood pressure, and ones who had had a heart attack, but didn't have a bypass just stents."

She was particularly surprised at the range of ages of people in her recovery group.

"There were people from 29 years old up to 71," she said. "That shocked me when I saw this little thin girl come in and I thought she had a family member. She just had very high blood pressure and they couldn't understand it. She said she watches what she eats. Some people eat healthy, exercise and it can still happen. We tend to look at big people and think that they have all the problems, but that's not true."

Nowadays, Mrs. Rock watches her diet closely and goes to the gym on a regular basis.

"I eat more whole grain foods such as brown rice and whole wheat pasta," she said. "Living healthier for me is about reducing the salt in my diet. It is about label reading when you go to the grocery store."

Mrs. Rock said that now that she has been through heart bypass surgery, it gives her more empathy with her own patients. "I can relate very easily to my patients now, because many of them were sent over to Johns Hopkins or Lahey clinic," she said. "Of course, now when they come in I can relate very easily to them and I am able to exchange things with them if they are having problems since they came back."

Mrs. Rock said she is not ashamed to show people the long scar on her chest.

"I'm a survivor," she said.