Heartburn question

So I’m currently around 17 1/2 weeks pregnant. First pregnancy. It’s going really well right now. Pretty easy for me. But this morning around 6am I woke up with a horrible pain in my chest. It almost hurt as much where I could cry. I never had heartburn in my life so I didn’t know what exactly heartburn felt like. But my boyfriend said it was probably heartburn because of how I described it to him.

My question is can heartburn really be that painful? It was a horrible feeling. Would this be normal?