Let me tell you a story. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in.
It’s personal, and I’ve thought long and hard about whether to put this out there, but recently I’ve been wondering about whether it could be helpful. And I’m grateful for where I am because of it. So, it starts like a day many of you have probably been through. It was July, 2019 and was that first day back to work after a two week vacation? Ugh. Yeah, I took two weeks (see title photo of me canoeing). And before that even, a few days off to recover from a quick meniscus knee surgery. It was incredible to take that much mental downtime. I’d really needed it. And I spent those two weeks on vacation knowing I was probably going to resign because I already had an informal offer for another position. Maybe the same stress, but much better compensation. Worth it, right? And I’d really relaxed on vacation. Anyway, yeah. First day back, Monday no less, I headed to our office in downtown Atlanta. I was at my office – sitting in our conference room in downtown Atlanta. I was having lunch which, on that day, consisted of a Nature Valley crunchy granola bar between client calls because, you know. No time. Who has time for lunch? Especially when you’ve been away and are trying to catch up and realize it’s not that there are no fires while you forced yourself to take a break, the fires just wait.
Anyway, I’d just finished inhaling the last of the granola bar two-pack and all of the sudden I had a growing pressure in my upper chest. I hit my chest to dislodge the clearly not very well chewed piece of my makeshift lunch down. I coughed. The pressure grew. I drank a ton of water, and waited for the feeling to subside. It didn’t. It was indigestion. Of course it was. Bad. Stupid to hurry through eating like that. I was jetlagged too. I checked my calendar. The rest of my meetings were outside calls that I could take from home, and a shit ton of emails to write. I probably needed to lie down for a bit, and I couldn’t do that at work. I said goodbye to the rest of my colleagues letting them know I’d respond to anything as soon as I was home.
I walked downstairs and out the door to the street and as soon as my feet hit the sidewalk outside it felt like my entire chest was being crushed. I literally dropped to my knees and knelt over for a good 1-2 minutes, willing it to go away. Surprisingly, even though dozens of people were walking by, not one person stopped to ask if I was ok, but I’ll leave that alone for now. I managed to look up and glance around, I needed to move. I got my phone out and called my wife.
She had driven to Charleston as soon as we’d landed where family was watching our dog and was on the way back to Atlanta. When she answered, I told her to take me off speaker phone since she was in the car with our oldest son. When I told her I was having chest pains she got very panicked and told me I needed to go to the the hospital. That seemed crazy. But maybe not. Still unsure – or unwilling to admit what was happening – rather than call 911 I spotted a couple of squad cars and stumbled over to them. They were empty and no sign of the officers inside. Maybe they were all in the donut shop, who knows? The parking garage loomed to the side of me. My car.
At this point I am in serious pain and sweating profusely – which thinking back, may be why no one wanted to talk to me.
After a minute of deciding what to do I went against all intelligence and logic and thought the best thing I could do was to walk to the garage, up several flights of stairs, and drive myself to the hospital. Not joking. So that’s what I did. Not able to remember where the closest hopital was, I patiently sat in my car, put “hospital” into Waze and off I went. I literally drove myself there – at this point I had pretty much accepted I was actually having a heart attack. Still I drove – obeying all traffic laws. I remember distinctly sitting at a red light and thinking I might die right there and I should run the light but, nope, I waited. But as I pulled into the area around Grady Hospital in downtown Atlanta, I couldn’t follow any more rules. I abandoned my car in the ambulance area and stumbled through the doors into the emergency room.
I made it up to the desk, and said to the woman, “I think I am having a heart attack. I need help”. She looked at me, pulled out a bunch of paperwork, and said that I needed to fill all this out and they would get to me as soon as possible. I think I went into some sort of shock and told her I didn’t think she understood that I needed help immediately. Then, I kid you not, she rolled her eyes and pointed me to a door and told me to go through there and someone would help me. I rushed through and saw another woman and told her what was happening, still in a lot of pain, now completely and utterly scared shitless (there was no doubt in my mind I was having a heart attack), so she calmly sat down, turned on the computer in front of her, and told me to sit down while she she took all my imformation. If you’re as shocked reading this as I was going through this, stick with me, it gets better.
She did take pity on me I think, put me on a gurney and rolled me to the triage area. She spoke with another nurse there and then told me that unfortunately there were no rooms or doctors available, but someone would be with me as soon as possible. Then she then walked away. I didn’t see her again. So, to clarify, there I am lying on a gurney against a wall in the emergency room, having a heart attack, and no one is doing anything.
Finally an angel of mercy
I honestly don’t know how long I waited there, now with intense pressure in my chest and excruciating spasms every minute or two. It felt like hours. My wife calls and I’m trying to let her know at least I’m at the hospital. She’s dropping my son home, and coming to me as fast as she can, she says, and I can tell she’s panicking and trying to hide it from our son. Why haven’t they seen you, she’s demanding. She’s scared, I know. I finally grabbed a nurse that walked by and told her, “I am having a heart attack and I know there’s no one to help me right now but can I just get something for the pain?” She looked at me with a shocked look on her face and asked if I was serious. Finally this angel of mercy handed me a nitro glycerin pill and told me to put it under my tongue and said she’d be right back.
They quickly rolled me into a room and got me hooked up to a bunch of machines and started taking blood, checking blood pressure etc etc – everything that should have been happening now was, and I was still alive. But here’s the thing. My EKG came back normal. Immediately they started telling me it was indigestion, and giving me GI cocktails for reflux. I don’t suffer from reflux. Or didn’t. Recently I’ve had a bit, and I know the difference now in a way I didn’t then. But I believed them. I needed to. Because why would I, a fairly active forty-seven year old, after a relaxing family vacation, be having a freaking heart attack. They took bloods, ordered a couple more tests, and checked on me constantly while we all waited for the pain to subside from the acid reflux treatments.
My wife arrived. She sat in a chair wedged against the wall by my head to keep the door clear for the comings and goings. She laid her hand on my chest with panic on her face, and I literally couldn’t stand it. Please don’t touch me, I remember saying, it’s too much pressure. In restropect, I think that’s when we both knew it really wasn’t reflux. Suddenly, my wife is saying something to a nurse. She told me later that she looked down and saw vials under my bed. They’d put them there on my way to my last test and maybe they were supposed to drop them off at the lab, and hadn’t. The nurse said they needed to take more bloods anyway, but that we’d be discharged soon anyway. However much time passed, the pain was slowly fading and all I wanted to do was sleep. And go home. I was embarrassed. Had I really stumbled into the emergency room for ingestion? Relieved, sure, but embarrassed. But feeling better was a good thing so, again, take the win.
My wife kept telling me it was better safe than sorry, and that we shouldn’t agree to leave until after they got all the blood tests back. Not that we had a choice, the time to prepare discharge papers is apparently longer than it takes to see a doctor to begin with, we laughed.
We don't call it that ...
And then a guy in chinos and a white shirt wandered in. He had a clip badge and held out a hand and introduced himself all casual. He was a doctor. He worked in the cardiac wing. He leaned against the counter in the room and crossed his legs. “So,” he started. “There’s this chemical called Troponin. It belongs in the heart. And when we see a little in the blood where it’s not supposed to be …” he goes on and on. My wife is asking, “so what are you saying?”
“We’re going to keep your husband overnight.”
I’m thinking, for indigestion? I was so out of it and exhausted it was hard to understand what he meant when he said myocardial infarction.
“So like a heart attack.” My wife is like a dog with a bone.
“We don’t call it that.”
“But it is.” She’s insisting.
“It was a small amount of troponin,” he assures her. “But it indicates a mild myocardial infarction.”
“A heart attack.” My wife. I would have laughed. Honestly, I probably did. Because I’m a healthy 47 year old man, and a fucking granola bar gave me a heart attack. (Sorry Nature Valley, I know it’s not you. It’s me.)
They agree they’ll keep taking my bloods overnight. My wife even making sure to remind him to make sure the vials make it to the lab, to which he gives a nonplussed look. All I know today is that they might have sent me home without another blood check if my wife hadn’t spotted the vials under the gurney.
I finally get transferred out of the emergency area and am admitted into a regular room. At this point most of the pressure in my chest is gone and I am feeling like I am incredibly lucky. I’ll need to get a cardiologist and figure this out, but that’s for another day. My wife stays for a while and eventually she needs to get home to be with our kids. We decide to wait to call family until I’m checked out and safely at home. No point worrying my parents when they are 5 hours away and are unable to do anything except worry. The doctors and nurses are acting like I am going home in the am, but they still have to wake me up every hour to take more blood as a precaution. Dot their i’s or whatever. Hopefully they didn’t lose any more of it in a chair, sofa, wherever….
We need to go in right now!
Morning finally comes and my wife gets there at 7 am with my charger and stuff from home so I can change before check out. The doctor from yesterday comes in with another guy in scrubs and introduces himself. He lets us know that overnight the measurements of troponin in my blood skyrocketed indicating that I had had a massive myocardial infarction. I think we both blink at him uncomprehending, but before we can formulate any kind of response there’s a flurry of activity at the door and men in black swarm into the room. They are all wearing flak jackets with the words STEM in bright red on the back. “So we need to go in right now,” the doctor is saying, as a swat team for the cardiac unit are filling up the room and unplugging all my wires. He’s trying to tell us about stents, and where my wife can wait and it’s all a blur but before I know it, a man with a heavy eastern European or maybe Russian accent is leaning over me and talking and telling me I am “in a very bad place” (oh and also that someone is about to start shaving my groin for a camera and stent – yay). He then proceeds to get me to sign a form basically saying I could die in the procedure at which point he tells me (in words to my face) that I absolutely could die. I do appreciate the honesty but not exactly what either my wife nor I wanted to hear. Oh. So like, by “now”, they mean like right now.
Ok this post is getting a bit long so let me wrap this up. I had the procedure during which they found I have a 90% blockage in my left anterior descending (LAD) artery – now more commonly known as the widowmaker. They also found another artery (sorry it doesn’t have a memorable name like the widowmaker) that has a 50% blockage but its not considered enough to put in another stent (typically only 70% or more blockages get a stent – another fun fact if you needed or wanted it). Everyone is acting like they are surprised I’m alive. You remember that knee surgery I mentioned way up front? Yeah, that doctor knew I was about to go on a long-haul flight to Europe for my vacation and made me take baby aspirin to avoid a blood clot complication from the knee surgery. Many small things added up to me being alive after the massive heart attack, but that guy was one of them. (And look, to be clear, for all the craziness and mistakes of that day, I need to also thank Grady Hospital for saving my life).
The procedure went well. I didn’t die. My wife, who I didn’t make a widow of, was in the waiting room calling everyone in the family and our close friends. She later told me, she’d never felt more terrified and alone. I’d have felt the same. I get it. They wheeled me back to my room and that afternoon, and I finally received a phone call I’d been waiting on for several weeks. A formal offer from the massive consulting firm I’d been talking with. I celebrated being alive by negotiating my salary lying in a hospital bed, because apparently the lesson the universe was trying to teach me went over my head.
I stayed in the hospital a couple more days before they released me back to my life and set me up with a heart doctor, someone I was hoping not to ever have to see, and certainly not when I was just 47.
I know I’m not the only one who used to think stress was manageable. Part of me still kind of thinks it is. That it’s mental not physical. That taking meds was optional until you got “older”. That making sure your body has everything is needs to perform optimally is a concept for health nuts and fitness junkies. That moment was a wake-up call for me. And my instinct in some ways was to hit the snooze button.
So, that’s my story. And I’m curious about you all. Maybe for those of you taking a few days off for the holidays, you can take time think about a few things. Are you managing your stress? How are you managing your stress and your physical health? I’m not saying what happened to me was all job-related, because I’ve spent some time unpacking how I got to that day and how I’m getting out of it, but how are YOU all managing it? Can my wake-up call be your wake-up call to assess what you’re doing right now to take care of yourself? I’d love to hear from you. And hopefully you’ll teach me a thing or two, as well. If you want to learn more about why we created onlyone™ Heart, you can also explore our About Us page, review the formula’s benefits, or take a closer look at the ingredients that support our approach to daily heart health.
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