By John Perry

“My heart stopped. For 30 seconds I hovered between this world and the next before doctors shocked me back into existence,” said Frank Haley. “I had no idea I was a heart attack waiting to happen.”

Every year, about 1 million Americans suffer a heart attack, and for about half of them, their first symptom is the attack.

Haley’s heart attack struck in three characteristic ways: unexpectedly, gradually and then suddenly.

Heart stopping
At 3:30 a.m., Oct. 6, 2002, Haley felt a growing heaviness in his chest. He sat up in bed and instinctively massaged the center of his chest. Thinking it must be indigestion from the spicy Mexican food he ate the night before, he swallowed an antacid.

Like so many heart attack victims, Haley, chief technology officer at Aviation, believed his discomfort would end.
It didn’t. But he almost did.

By 7:30 a.m., discomfort had become wrenching pain. Convinced something was seriously wrong, Haley was driven to the nearest emergency room.

After describing his symptoms, he was given an aspirin to chew as an ER doctor examined him.

The pain spasms were now unbearable. Morphine was injected. Feeling better, Haley said he even considered leaving the hospital.

But a wave of nausea swept over him. In a cold sweat and on the verge of vomiting, he asked to be turned on his side. There was a flash of bright light. Then the world went black.

And for Haley, 54, time stood still.

A distant voice cut through the blackness. “Mr. Haley, can you hear me? Mr. Haley!”

In a haze, he slowly awakened.

“I saw three sets of eyes staring over surgical masks,” Haley said, believing he was in a nightmare. “My shirt was cut away and there were (automated external defibrillator) pads glued to my chest.

“I told them I could hear them,” Haley said. “And from the looks of things, I was mighty glad I could still be heard.”

The doctors told him he wasn’t out of the woods and asked permission to administer the clot-busting drug Retavase, Haley said. That’s the juice of choice for clearing the arterial blockage causing his attack.

“The electrical shocks and Retavase brought me back from the brink,” Haley said.

Later, Haley was told that his left anterior descending artery was 99 percent blocked by plaque, a buildup of cholesterol in the arterial walls.

The plaque had ruptured, causing platelets, microscopic particles within the blood that form clots. In his case, a clot had broken away and blocked the already-restricted blood flow, causing his near-fatal attack, Haley said.

Two stents, tiny cylindrical scaffolds, were inserted into his heart to prop open the coronary arteries.

A fit-looking 6-foot, 150-pound nonsmoker, Haley regularly jogged three miles and seemed an unlikely candidate for cardiac arrest.

“What gets me is how I didn’t have any symptoms prior to my attack,” said Haley, whose blood pressure had been intermittently high since he was 32. It was usually 160/90, but never severe and controlled with medication.

But Haley had a hidden problem.

His cholesterol levels weren’t where they should be. His high-density lipoproteins, known as good cholesterol, were only 35 mg/dL. Anything below 40 is considered too low. But the HDL wasn’t clearing away his low-density lipoproteins, known as bad cholesterol.

The result: Plaque was ever so silently collecting, especially in the bends and turns of arterial walls. Years went by. There weren’t any noticeable symptoms – until that October morning.

“It just goes to show how sneaky and insidious coronary heart disease can be,” Haley said.

Continued
1 l 2 l 3 l next >>

Cardiologist James H. Young tells a patient with high blood pressure to be more physically active while taking medication and following a strict low-salt, low-fat diet. Photo by John Perry.