I wrote about my
experience in my autobiography, “My Life,” but most of the people viewing this
on my blog will not have read it. So although the basis of what follows is that
book, I think it’s worth repeating. If it even helps one person survive or even
manage a heart attack situation in the future, then it will have been worth the
retelling.
Here are a few
quotes from the Reader’s Digest article:
“In recent years
hospitals have slashed the time it takes to clear a blockage in a patient’s
arteries. Often it took more than two hours for blood to flow to a patient’s
heart again. Now nearly all hospitals treat at least half their patients in 61
minutes or less. From 2003 to 2013, the death rate from coronary heart disease
fell about 38 percent…”
“In November 2006,
the American College of Cardiology announced a national campaign…”
“They looked for
opportunities to shave a minute or two here and there. They had paramedics do
an electrocardiogram and transmit it directly to the emergency room”
Since my heart
attack occurred in 2005, it was before most of these changes took place in many
hospitals. However, the hospital where I was taken was already beginning to
experiment with these changes and so I am a survivor. Here is my story.
Heart attack
In January of 2005 I had a major medical incident. It was a Sunday afternoon. My wife Donna and I had gone shopping after
church and were at the Trexlertown Plaza.
We were in Kohl’s. As is often
the case on a Sunday afternoon, I was getting tired and ready for my Sunday
afternoon nap – that’s usually the only day I could take one. So I went out to the car to nap while she
finished shopping.
I awoke perhaps a half-hour later, but wasn’t feeling quite
right. I thought that perhaps I just
needed to wake up a bit more, so lay there quietly. But I wasn’t starting to feel better, in fact
I was starting to feel worse and was starting to feel pain in my left arm and
the left side of my chest. After
considering this for perhaps a minute – all the while the pain worsening – I
came to the conclusion that these were classic symptoms of a heart attack. Rather than try to find Donna, I pulled out
my cell phone and dialed 911. I told the
operator that I thought I was having a heart attack, told her where I was
located in the parking lot, and said, “Come and get me.” I also told her that my wife was in
Kohl’s. Before the ambulance arrived,
Donna also came back from shopping. I
was told later that the 911 operator had called Kohl’s and they had paged
Donna, but she was already leaving the building by that time.
I should mention here
that my medical exposure for heart attacks was based on the TV show “Emergency!”
which aired from 1972 until 1977. But the scenarios from that TV show were
about to be played out in real life for me. I don’t recall anyone one the show
calling 911 on themselves. But I wasn’t going to wait for someone else when I
knew I needed help – fast! I was also about to experience things like “diaphoretic,”
a term which I had often heard on the show and had never bothered to check out
the meaning of. When the EMTs applied it to me, I recognized it, and when I
checked it out later I found it meant that I was sweating profusely even though
I was not overheated. But at the time, I was dealing with this emergency both
physically and mentally and a lot of what was going on was just being
automatically filed away in my mind for later processing.
By the time the ambulance arrived – only a few minutes later
– I was no longer able to exit the car on my own. The EMTs took me out of the car, put me on a
stretcher, and loaded me into the back of the ambulance and told Donna that she
could meet them at the ER. They removed
some of my clothing (just use sharp scissors – I sacrificed my shirt, pants,
and even my belt that afternoon – a small price to pay!), and putting a couple
of leads on me, they connected me to an EKG machine. Meanwhile they first gave me a couple of baby
aspirin, then a couple of nitrate pills to hold under my tongue and asked if
that helped – it didn’t. They had a new
technology in the ambulance at the time – being able to send the EKG results
directly to the ER via the EMT’s cell phone.
Thus, when I got there they were already waiting for me, they had
confirmed that I was indeed having a heart attack. In fact, they were already preparing the cath
lab for me – just had to clean up after the prior patient and put me next on
the schedule.
They gave me a shot of morphine, but it really didn’t do
much (when they asked how much pain I was feeling on a 1-10 scale, I said,
“I’ve had a kidney stone, so on that scale this is only an 8.”) Shortly after Donna arrived, they wheeled me
out the door to the cath lab. After
swabbing me down with what seemed like a gallon of disinfectant (colors the
skin yellow), they made an incision in the vein in my groin and threaded the
catheter up through my heart, out the aorta, and down the coronary artery. (I was not paying much attention at the time,
just trying to deal with the pain – this is all what they told me later.) They confirmed that I had 100% blockage of
the LAD (Left Anterior Descending artery) and 75-80% blockage of the Circumflex
artery. They dealt with only the former
at this time. The surgeon put a wire
mesh stent on the end of the catheter and pushed it through the blockage, then
inflated the balloon on the end of the catheter which expanded the mesh and
opened up the artery (it compresses the fatty deposit that is the blockage
against the artery wall). The pain
immediately disappeared!
They then closed up the incision and sent me upstairs to the
cardiac care unit (CCU) for the next few days for observation. Total time from onset of initial symptoms to
opening up the blockage was less than an hour.
It was this quick reaction that probably saved my life. I’ve read that the survival rate from this
type of blockage is about 7%. That’s why
it’s known as the “widow maker”. I am
not only part of that 7%, but have zero long-term issues.
You can see how my
experience so much mirrors the Reader’s Digest article. Even though this was
before the 2006 campaign by the American College of Cardiology, I was able to
experience having the EMTs take the EKG, the quick response team in the ER,
etc. I only knew that it was new at the time because while I was in the CCU
someone from the hospital asked me to sign a form to allow them to use my case
as training material since those kinds of things were still experimental.
While I was in the CCU that afternoon there was one
complication. They cut into a major blood vessel in your groin to insert the
catheter, the stent, etc. Afterwards they stitch it closed, then they put a
heavy bag of sand over the incision point – both to immobilize you and to keep
the incision point stable. But even with those precautions, sometimes the blood
vessel still “leaks.” It did in my case and I started getting a large bruise as
the blood was flowing under my skin. The nurses recognized this immediately.
The “treatment” is to express the area and stop the blood from pooling around
the incision point – giving you a larger “bruise” but that will eventually go
away. With men they also have to try to move the blood away from the scrotum
which is only a few inches away. Otherwise the scrotum can fill with blood and
it will get swollen and quite painful. So, like many medical procedures, you
just have to put aside any ideas of modesty as the nurse massages the area to
spread the blood around until the blood vessel stops leaking. I had a large
discolored area when it was all over, but that was a small price to pay.
On Wednesday I made my second trip downstairs to the cath
lab to get the other blockage cleared (again via a stent). This time I was wide awake and very aware of
what was going on. The doctor has three
monitors. One displays my vital
symptoms, one is a real-time x-ray of the area around the heart so he can see
where the catheter is, etc, and the final one is like the second but can be
“frozen”. When he is nearing the area where
the blockage is, he can squirt a bit of dye out the end of the catheter that
gives contrast of the arteries and “lights up” the blood flow – he then freezes
that image on the third monitor. He can
then guide the catheter to that exact spot before expanding the stent. Amazing technology! By stretching my neck and looking around the
large x-ray machine that was over my chest, I could see all three monitors and
know what was going on. The spatial
exercise of looking at the picture on the monitor and translating that to where
inside my chest and heart the catheter was actually located was interesting.
On Thursday I was released from the hospital. The next Sunday I was back in church, like
I’d never gone through this, and people were amazed. Of course I couldn’t drive for a couple of
weeks and was out of work for about six weeks, but that was not much compared
to the second chance on life that I’d been given.
I’d always wondered how strong my faith in God really was –
if I was being threatened with my life, would I deny him. Now I know.
While all the events – from initial symptoms to the surgery – were
happening and it was a good possibility that I might not survive, I was
absolutely at peace. There was no panic,
no prayers of desperation, none of that.
I was confident in my relationship with God and the knowledge that no
matter what happened that I would be seeing Him whenever my life here on earth
would end. Now, ten years later as I
write this, I still have that absolute assurance that He is with me and I am
with Him.
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