Sushmita Sen stayed conscious during surgery after suffering heart attack: ‘I didn’t want pain numbed, asked doctors to hurry’

Sushmita Sen recalled the time she suffered a heart attack and how she chose to remain conscious throughout the episode as well as during the surgery that followed.

Sushmita Sen on suffering a heart attack. (Photo: Sushmita Sen/ Instagram)

Actress Sushmita Sen, 49, suffered a massive heart attack in February 2023 while she was shooting for her web series Aarya Season 3. As per reports, the actress had a 95 percent blockage in her arteries, for which she underwent surgery. Now, during a podcast with Divya Jain, the former Miss Universe recalled how she chose to stay conscious through the procedure. She even explained why she chose to get back to work after 15 days of having a heart attack.

Talking about suffering a heart attack, Sushmita said, “When you suffer a heart attack and you are conscious through it, you kind of know how close you came to being on the other side of life. Once you cross that, you also know how far behind it is now, and you know the difference. Also I have become a person who has so much to do, between running my professional life, being Sushmita Sen as a brand, being a single mother with two daughters – watching over their security along with their roles at development, life has been about a lot of adjustments and somewhere in the middle I have had relationships also, if you look at all of these aspects, I only know how to keep going. In my mind, everything is transient, including a heart attack. If I were not to survive it, then there would be no story to tell, but if you have survived it, then no point sitting a harping about what happened then.”

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Sushmita Sen also revealed that she remained conscious during her surgery after suffering a heart attack and was eager to return to the sets of Aarya 3 as soon as possible. Sushmita said, “All my doctors will tell you, I was very impatient with them. I said I didn’t want to be unconscious during the procedure. The control freak in me doesn’t like losing consciousness; it’s also the reason why I survived the heart attack, because it was a choice between suffering it and staying conscious and losing consciousness and sleeping, then not waking up. I was conscious throughout that, and wanted to be conscious through the procedure. I was very clear about not numbing the pain; I wanted to see what was going on. I went through that and kept chatting with doctors, asking them to hurry up, because I wanted to go back on set. My entire crew was waiting in Jaipur.”

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She added, “When you headline a show, it’s not an ordinary job; you have the privilege of taking on the onus of a 500-member crew. They have all been very nice to you; they understand and are concerned about you, but at the same time, I am concerned about the fact that their daily wages are stuck, and you cannot shoot without me. I was okay, had done whatever I had to, so I had to get on with it. They were sort of shouting at me, still, it took me 15 days negotiating with them, but then I was allowed to go back and film Aarya.”

Aarya Season 3 was released on Jio Hotstar in November 2023, and the second part of the third season was released in February 2024.

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