Personal column: 'I was in very good health. Then, age 36, I had a heart attack'

What happens if your health fails early? Haitham Dawwas was in a restaurant when the chest pain started

There was no warning. In fact, I had very good health before the evening of 13 December 2004 when I went out for a meal with half a dozen fellow members of the management team from my telecoms company.

We were in a nice restaurant in Park Lane. The meal was lovely but after it I felt that perhaps I had had one glass of wine too many. I suddenly felt very sick and started sweating. I began to think that I might have to spend the night in a hotel in London and not take the train home to my wife, Gabrielle, and my two-year-old son, Oliver, in Brighton.

I went to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face and came back to the table. One of my colleagues asked if I was OK. Apparently, I was very white and still sweating. I told him that I felt as if I had the weight of a building on my chest. One of my other colleagues, trained in First Aid, asked if the pain in my chest had travelled to my arm. Just as she asked, that began to happen. My colleague thought it was a heart attack and called an ambulance right way. It seemed incredible. I was only 36 years old.

I remember the pain and just wanting to sleep but my colleague kept saying: "Stay with us, Haitham. Think of your son." I remember that as if it were yesterday. Apparently it would have been very bad if I had lost consciousness.

When the paramedics came they kept asking me what I had taken. They thought I had taken drugs. I was furious about that for a while but it was the party season and there I was, this young guy in an expensive restaurant, sweating and not feeling well. They probably thought 36 was too young for a heart attack. It was the same when I got to the hospital. One doctor asked if I had taken Viagra.

I had to have an angioplasty, where they insert a tiny balloon through your groin to open up a blockage in an artery. The effect was immediate. The pain just went. Then they put a stent in to prop up the artery. I was so lucky that night to be in London and near St Mary's, one of the best heart hospitals in the world. Had I been on the train to Brighton, it's unlikely I would have reached hospital in time. It turned out that my main left artery was 100 per cent blocked and two others were 90 per cent and 70 per cent blocked. I had to have two more angioplasties a few weeks later.

The heart attack changed everything. I had been just a few weeks away from moving to Geneva to a new job. We had been looking forward to living near the mountains and lakes. I had thought the move might bring a better work-life balance. That move was clearly not going to happen.

The heart attack also wiped out some of the certainty from life. My wife just couldn't take it in when my boss called her to say I had had a suspected heart attack. She ran across the road to where her mother lives and apparently she could only point at her chest. She couldn't say anything. She drove up that night with Oliver and they arrived at about 2am. I think it frightened him to see Daddy attached to so many machines

I spent my 37th birthday in hospital and came home just before Christmas. I had assumed I would be back to normal in no time. I really didn't understand how ill I was until I tried to walk. I was so slow. I had been used to walking everywhere very fast. We also had to try to explain to Oliver that Daddy couldn't play rough with him any more.

The weakness was hard to take, and not just for me. The slightest twitch and Gabrielle was nervous about me. I think this sort of health shock is worse for a partner. Also Oliver seemed to be nervous. Even now, two years on, when my wife picks him up from nursery, he always asks if I'm at home. He doesn't like it if I am in London where the heart attack happened.

Initially, I wanted a reason. As far as I could find out, there was no heart disease in the family. My cholesterol was raised at 6.2 but it wasn't sky-high and my blood pressure was low, not high. OK, I smoked, but only 15 cigarettes a day. It was easy to give up but as I started to feel better I started to miss them.

I asked myself if I had put myself under too much stress. But I really liked the adrenaline rushes that I got as head of solution management, although internal organisational issues could be stressful.

My consultants didn't have an answer but I tend to go for the stress theory. A nutritionist recently took samples of my hair and blood and said they contained high levels of copper, mercury and sodium, which are all linked with stress. In the run-up to the heart attack, I was working 12 to 14 hours a day and taking work home at the weekends. Although I ate healthily, and wasn't overweight, I ate at the wrong times.

In addition, although I had been very fit as a young man - I played table tennis internationally when I was 16, was a very good swimmer and was on the university volleyball team - I wasn't doing much exercise before the heart attack.

For a while I asked myself: why me? I would look at people who were overweight or smoking 40 a day and wonder why they were fine rather than me. But eventually I let that go. It was making me depressed. I decided that it was necessary to move on.

At the end of January, I got a personal trainer. I was exercising five times a week, taking long walks and jogs. Getting fit almost became my full-time job. The support I got from my boss was crucial. He told me not to worry about work, to take my time to get well. That was a load off my mind.

In June I did a charity 10km run in Hyde Park. When I mentioned to my consultant that my heart had raced after the run, he did an angiogram. I was so shocked when he said that the main artery had blocked again and recommended a bypass. I wondered when the whole thing would end.

I was also adamant that I was not having my chest opened up. I felt I was too young. They have to break your ribs to get in to repair the heart and it takes six months to recover. I had just gone back to work and felt I couldn't face six more months of illness. I was prepared to chance another stent. That's when the consultant suggested I see Roberto Casula, pioneer of new robotic bypass surgery that did not involve cracking open the rib cage.

I agreed to the cutting-edge procedure the first time I spoke to Roberto Casula. Gabrielle wasn't happy that I took the decision without talking to her. Neither was my mother. But when they met him the night before my operation, they said they understood why I trusted him.

The robotic bypass was a success and instead of a huge scar and months of recovering, I was left with just a 7cm scar. Three days after the operation I went for a 5km walk.

That was in October. Later this month I run the London Marathon for the British Heart Foundation. I want to raise awareness that people are having heart attacks younger these days. I've never been in better shape but the past two years have changed my outlook.

I'm more conscious of what is important in life now - like the need to give more attention to the people in your life who love you and not to see work as the be-all and end-all. I have traded my old job for a less stressful consultancy role that allows me to work from home part of the week. I want to be around when Oliver goes to university and I want to be there when he gets married.

Haitham Dawwas was talking to Mary Braid bhf.org.uk