‘It was like there was an elephant standing on my chest’: How a heart attack led a pharmacist into a world of comedy
'It wasn’t enough being a Scottish female Pakistani actress, clearly'
A pharmacist who suffered a cardiac arrest eight years ago whilst on the way to write her will has turned the experience into a comedy set which will be performed in Manchester later this week.
Unbeknownst to her at the time, Lubna Kerr, from Edinburgh, suffered the health episode in 2016 on the way to her lawyers. She had just finished running her morning clinic when she said she started to feel like ‘there was an elephant standing on my chest’.
“The irony of the whole thing is that I run clinics to help people not to have a heart attack - how I did not understand it was happening to me is crazy,” Lubna tells the Manchester Evening News of the experience.
“But what I say in my show is that the symptoms between a man and a woman can be quite different and a lot of the textbooks and medical research was historically done on men and almost always written by men.”
Lubna says she did not experience some of the most common symptoms of a cardiac arrest, which can include a shortness of breath and a central chest pain that spreads to the left arm, so was not immediately concerned.
“It lasted about five minutes and then it went - that was it,” she explains. “I just went to see my lawyer, visited some charity shops, and went to a comedy show that night, and went back to work the next day. I had no idea it was a heart attack.”
It was only a couple of days later when she had a second episode at work that caused Lubna to take things seriously. Spending a week in A&E, it was discovered that, along with high blood pressure and being low in Vitamin D levels, a clot had almost blocked one of the arteries to her heart.
“I felt like a bit of a fraud,” Lubna said. “I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t take drugs and I have a relatively healthy diet, but it’s interesting that one of the biggest factors in it all was that it had been caused by stress. I was very stressed with work.”
Lubna said the experience, along with still trying to cope with the grief of losing her mum in 2013, led her to make some very big decisions in her life. Not only did she stop working as a pharmacist on a full-time basis, she chose to focus more on her acting and comedy career - having previously completed a stand-up comedy course a few years earlier.
“It took me a long time to come to terms with the grief and the experience of it all, but it made me decide that I was going to just do whatever it was that I wanted to do,” Lubna, who has appeared in BBC shows like Two Doors Down and Scot Squad, said.
“My parents brought us up on comedy - my father loved Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, and Dave Allan was his favourite - so I grew up around that and enjoyed it. As an adult, I’d always go to comedy clubs and, becoming an actress, I felt like I needed a bit more of a unique selling point - it wasn’t enough being a Scottish female Pakistani actress, clearly.
Having previously worked on one-woman play, Tickbox, which has toured across the UK for the last three years and explores her family's history, she is now ready to share more about her cardiac arrest - and other words beginning with C - as part of a second comedy show in what she is billing as a Chatterbox trilogy.
Taking place at Creatures Comedy Club, in the basement of Northern Quarter bar Corner Boy, on Saturday (October 12) afternoon as part of the Women in Comedy Festival, The C Word will also see Lubna discuss everything from cricket to cheese.
“I don’t want people to worry that it’s one long medical story, it’s not going to be like an episode of Casualty with jokes,” she laughs. “There are lots more C words that I’ll explore in the show, cheese, children, cricket, communication, confidence, confusion, creativity – the list is pretty comprehensive and constantly evolving.
“It’s a journey of highs and lows, which will make you laugh, reflect, and think about the C words in your own life.”
Tickets for Lubna's show at Creatures Comedy Club on Saturday (October 12) at 1pm can be bought here. You can follow Lubna on Facebook here.