Breathlessness is one of the most common complaints in a heart OPD, and also one of the most casually dismissed. “Bas thak gaya hoon, age ho rahi hai, stamina kam ho gaya.” Sometimes that is fair. But when the heart or valves are involved, the pattern usually becomes too consistent to ignore.
Heart‑related breathlessness often appears when the body asks for modest extra effort—climbing one flight of stairs, walking quickly to catch an elevator, or taking a bridge on your bike. If you now need to stop and “catch your breath” on routes that felt easy a few months ago, especially with chest heaviness, a racing heartbeat, or ankle swelling, this is no longer just poor fitness. It is the kind of pattern that sends patients to surgeons like me for coronary or valve evaluation.
In people with valve disease or weak heart muscle, another clue is how they breathe at night. Adding extra pillows to sleep, feeling breathless when lying flat, or waking up gasping can indicate that the heart is not pumping efficiently and fluid is backing up into the lungs. These are the patients who later land up on my table for bypass, valve repair, or minimally invasive procedures often after weeks of blaming the weather or pollution.
From my perspective as a cardiothoracic surgeon, the aim is not to rush every breathless person to surgery. It is to answer a precise question: is the heart failing to keep up, and if so, can we fix the underlying problem before it becomes an emergency? Sometimes the solution is medication and conditioning; sometimes it is a well‑timed valve intervention or bypass. If “bas thak gaya hoon” has quietly become your everyday line, it is time to let your heart be examined properly.