The feeling of suffocating, sudden palpitations, especially after physical effort, quick, difficult breathing, waking up with a start, cachectic pallor, a feeling of pressure and constriction in the precordial region and of heaviness and numbness in the left arm are overwhelming signs of heart diseases in which only anatomy can distinguish pericarditis (which affects the investing membrane), aneurism (affecting the muscular tissue), or contractions and hardening (in which the heart is affect in its tendinous or fibrous parts).