Last Monday started out about as low-stress as any Monday could be.

I had just passed an important milestone: 10 years since my heart attack, with very little to worry about since. I’ve been pretty good about keeping to my diet, even losing 20 pounds recently. I was a little less good about my exercise regimen, but I never got out of breath anymore anyway. I had just gotten a couple of articles out to my editor the previous Friday, on short deadline no less.

So today’s tasks, which consisted of delivering my son to his college acting class, some computer first aid for a friend who lives near the college, and running a couple of errands seemed like they would be no problem whatsoever.

So, off we went. I dropped my son off and then went to visit my friend, solved her problems, had a nice visit, and even some leftover sushi. Then I picked up my son and dropped in to Home Depot for some Osmocote, then headed to Sam’s Club for syringes, which we use in bulk keeping our diabetic cat well and happy.

But just walking up to the front entrance was suddenly quite a chore. I felt “off”, and had a peculiar burning feeling in my esophagus. This generally means either heartburn or mild angina, but 10 years ago it meant a heart attack, so there’s a whole decision tree that I go through. Usually I start with Tums and water, and usually that’s all it takes, but today I was out and about, so we sat down and I took a nitroglycerin pill. These generally clear up angina in about 60 seconds, but they also have the side effect of making your blood pressure drop like crazy, so it’s prudent to at least sit down for 5 minutes. Strangely, I was having trouble getting the damn thing under my tongue today, so I just mushed it to paste with my finger. And I was feeling extremely low in the blood pressure department, so I laid down on the concrete floor, figuring I couldn’t fall down and hurt myself this way.

This got the attention of a few people, and I realized I was feeling worse than I should at this point, so I told my son to call 911. The next thing I saw was a very welcome sight indeed: a bunch of no-nonsense, well-trained firefighters with an ambulance. I quickly gave them my basic health info and they strapped me into a gurney. One of them asked if I felt nauseous and I answered by barfing in his general direction.

I tried to calm myself by watching all the traffic lights upside down and backwards, when someone said I was starting to fibrillate, so they stuck these patches on my back and hooked me up to a combination pacemaker and Taser which started shocking me silly at 80 beats per minute.

I remember getting to the hospital, going through corridors, and then basically nothing else until I woke up and someone asked me if I knew what day it was. I said no, so they told me “Wednesday”. Then there was some other unpleasantness, and I woke up again and it was Thursday, I was in a different hospital in downtown Sacramento, and I was told I had survived a rather large heart attack (via balloon angioplasty).

A Fucking Miracle

There’s really no other way to put it. If we hadn’t stopped at Sam’s, we would have been on the freeway during rush hour when this happened. Sam’s just happened to be about 90 seconds away from the ambulance firehouse and only five minutes from the first hospital. After I was stabilized there, they were able to transfer me to the larger hospital where they could do the angioplasty.

But what I didn’t know then — and didn’t find out until I was finally discharged from the hospital yesterday — is that when I got to the first hospital’s emergency room, I was in full cardiac arrest. They did a classic defibrillation (you know…the emergency room doctor yelling “Clear!” and the paddles and the body hopefully jumping off the table on its own), which IT people refer to as a “full system reset”.

My wife got there sometime after that, and was in the room with my son when suddenly I went into arrest again. Please spare a thought here for these two, who had to watch me go through this procedure in real life, not knowing whether it would work or not.

But even that’s not the miracle I was referring to.

My heart surgeon told my family that the heart attack I had was so massive that I wouldn’t have even made it to the first emergency room, except that my heart had proactively generated its own bypass artery in advance.

This is apparently one of the hottest topics in cardiovascular medicine right now, and it’s based on circulating endothelial progenitor cells, which are kind of like stem cells but present in adult bodies. The research being done involves stimulating the body to do this using gene or growth hormone technologies, but on rare occasions, the body will “sense a disturbance in the force” and try to fix things on its own. So, it’s quite likely that my first heart attack 10 years ago helped me live through this one.

So people, please take good care of yourselves.

And please throw out your leftover sushi.