The Day That Changed My Life

My life was turned upside down one year ago on February 1, 2019.  I hadn’t felt well for about 6 weeks and noticed it for the first time a few days before Christmas when I changed the brakes on my wife’s car.  Every time I stood up from squatting down, my head would spin.  I just had a bad ear infection the month before and assumed it had returned.  The symptoms really spiked on Christmas Eve.  I had very little energy to go with the dizziness.  On Christmas Day, I got off of my in-laws couch and got so dizzy that I fell back onto it.  I called my ENT and got in a few days later.  She said my ears were clear but that she wanted to do blood work.  A nurse called back a week later to tell me I had mono.  How could I have mono when I had it in college?  The nurse said it matched my symptoms and it was showing up in my blood.  I saw a doctor in my family practice a week later and she did not think it was mono.  She suspected a sinus infection.  I told her I had no pain in my sinus cavity or teeth like I did with the numerous sinus infections I had previously.  She wanted me to get a CT Scan of my sinuses and take an antibiotic.  I did neither.  Hoping it was mono, I just rested as much as I could.  Two weeks later, I got in with my actual primary physician.  He said it was not mono.  It was showing up on my blood test because I had it when I was younger.  He also suspected a sinus infection but did order more blood work to see if it was something else.  Three days later and still waiting for the results of the blood work, the calendar read February 1st.  

We had an unexpected snowstorm that morning.  My wife usually has a 25 minute commute to work.  This particular Friday, because of a surprising three inches of snow, the commute was 90 minutes.  The time in traffic disrupted her entire day.  I spent the day on the couch feeling completely exhausted.  Every time I got up, my head would spin.  Lisa called me around 3pm and said that she was coming home early but she was stopping at the grocery store first.  We still had snow in the driveway so I pulled myself off of the couch, bundled up, and headed outside to shovel the sidewalk and driveway so we didn’t have to deal with the snow when she got home with the groceries.  It was around 15 degrees and I was outside in a couple of hoodies and shorts. I shoveled most of the drive and was doing fine.  The snow was pretty light until I got to the bottom of the driveway where it mixed with the salt on the road.  I finished up the job by picking up that heavy snow and I lost my breath.  In 2017, I had suffered with bronchitis and struggled breathing for almost 5 months.  In 2018, I battled pneumonia.  I was also told I had allergy induced asthma.  Assuming that that was what was causing my shortness of breath, I went into the house, got into bed and used my inhalers.  It helped some but not completely.  I also had a dull ache in my left shoulder.  It started all settling down and then Lisa came home.  Not wanting Lisa to carry in the groceries herself, I went outside and put about six grocery bags in each hand like I always do.  I carried them in and then the proverbial crap hit the fan.  I couldn’t breathe again and now the shoulder pain was very intense.  I laid back down and there was no improvement.  In fact, it kept getting worse.  I have had a great deal of pain in my life.  In college and in my 20’s, I had 20 kidney stones.  I lived with severe back pain for years and years.  Other than a couple of my kidney stones, this was the worst pain I had experienced.  I couldn’t get comfortable or find any relief.  We tried heating pads and ice.  Nothing worked.  I was sweating and very hot so I went into the basement where it was cooler.  I sat on my chair with no relief.  I got up and moved to the couch with no relief.  I couldn’t sit still because the pain was so bad.  It felt like somebody was driving a knife into my shoulder blade.  I was back in my chair when the pain traveled down my left arm.  I took two painkillers that I had left over from my tonsillectomy in 2016.  Next, I got a vicious headache.  It felt like my head was going to blow off of my shoulders.  Lisa came down and asked if she should call 911.  I told her no.  I don’t remember this, but Lisa said I held the top of my head and screamed “I don’t know what’s happening to me!!”  Again, she wanted to call 911.  I refused.  I thought I probably just pinched a nerve in my neck shoveling the snow.  Lisa said I started sweating profusely and was very clammy.  Now she was calling 911 no matter what I said.  

As we were waiting for the paramedics to arrive, I was scrambling around, gathering my chargers and other “necessities” for my trip to the hospital.  I also changed my clothes while Lisa was yelling at me to sit down and wait.  About 5 minutes after she called, the paramedics arrived.  They assessed me on the couch and said they thought I pinched a nerve in my neck.  Lisa thought to herself, “Jamison is going to kill me.”  The EMTs asked if I could walk to the ambulance.  Trying to be a tough guy, I said yes.  They had me lie on the gurney in the back of the ambulance and did an EKG.  I saw the look the one EMT gave to the driver and I knew it wasn’t good.  She looked at me and said, “Sir, you are having a heart attack”.  I couldn’t believe it.  I felt a few tears come out of my left eye.  The EMT wiped them away and said that I should be ok because she thought we caught it early.  I told her that I wasn’t afraid to die because I actually look forward to going to heaven but that I wasn’t ready to leave my family.  I want to see my kids finish school.  I want to be a grandfather someday. As I laid there on the gurney, I prayed to God saying, “Lord, You have brought me through too much for my life to end like this.”  The EMT did another EKG and it confirmed that I was indeed having a heart attack.  She took my blood pressure and it was down to 60/40.  I was in excruciating pain and I couldn’t sit still.  She apologized that she couldn’t give me anything for the pain because any pain medication would kill me due to my blood pressure being so low. The EMT asked which hospital I wanted to go to.  I said we have UPMC insurance so take me to UPMC East in Monroeville.  She said, “Sir, if I take you to East, they don’t have the capability to deal with this.  They will look you over and send you to Presby in Oakland.  You won’t survive to see Presby.  We need to take you to Forbes.”  I am thinking to myself, “why did you bother asking then?!?”

Lisa was sitting in the car behind the ambulance wondering what was taking so long.  The driver walked up to her window and told her, “Your husband is having a heart attack.  We are going to Forbes with sirens and lights.  DO NOT try to keep up with us.”  We started flying to the hospital.  What would usually take 15-20 minutes took only 7 minutes.  Before we even came to a complete stop in the hospital parking lot, the back doors flew open and a large crew of people raced me into the Emergency Department.  8 doctors and nurses were waiting for me in the ER bay and they went to work.  They wanted to cut off my favorite shorts and Steelers pullover but I insisted that I take them off.  I told them they don’t make them anymore so I could not replace them.  The one nurse just shook her head in disbelief.  They got me semi-stabilized and were able to give me morphine for the pain.  It didn’t help one bit.  A few minutes later, they gave me Dilaudid and it also did nothing.  A few minutes after that they gave me Fentanyl.  It didn’t touch the pain.  The nurses informed me that I was fortunate because the cardiac team was still at the hospital this late on a Friday evening.  They had just finished working on someone else when I was ready to go into the catherization lab.  I asked if they would knock me out to do the catherization and the nurses told me I wouldn’t remember it.  My dad said he never remembered his procedures.  They gave me another medication to put me in a twilight state.  It didn’t touch the pain and didn’t knock me out.  

I remember every detail of my heart catherization.  The cardiologist said they would normally go through my wrist but since time was so critical and the room was still set up from the last patient, they were going through my groin.  I remember feeling the pressure when they cut me open.  I saw some of my blood squirt up on the cardiologist.  The nurses were trying to get my mind off of the procedure by asking me questions.  I knew the trick they were employing to distract me but I just answered their questions.  One nurse asked, “What do you do for a living?”  I answered, “I am a pastor”.  They jokingly said to put in a good word for them with my boss.  The cardiologist did inform me that if he could not get the stent in, we would be doing emergency open heart surgery.  I began earnestly praying that God would guide the cardiologist and that the stent would go in.  They worked on me for a little while and the pain disappeared instantly.  Dr. Dua, my brand new cardiologist, got the stent in.  He informed me that my right coronary artery was 100% blocked and that I was very fortunate to still be alive.  He walked out and told Lisa that “the timing was everything”.  A few more minutes and I probably wouldn’t have survived and if I had, I would have had a badly damaged heart.  They took me up to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit where I would spend the next two nights.

Being wheeled out of the catherization lab.

After everyone went home, I laid in that hospital bed trying to process what had just happened.  Did I really just come close to dying?  How did this happen?  I was only 45 years old!  I talked with numerous doctors and nurses that weekend and they all asked me if I was a heavy smoker.  I told them that I’ve smoked one cigarette in my entire life when I was 14 years old.  Most of my friends smoked and I stole one of my dad’s cigarettes, climbed up into the loft of the small barn on the back of our property, and smoked it.  It was disgusting and I never touched another cigarette in my life.  They asked if I was a heavy drinker.  I told them I could count the number of alcoholic drinks I have consumed on both hands and that I hadn’t had any in over 13 years.  They asked if I had family members with heart problems.  My paternal grandmother had a number of heart issues including open heart surgery.  My dad had four stents put in but he was a smoker for almost 50 years.  They said that the cause of my heart attack was likely genetics and that if I had smoked or drank alcohol, it likely would’ve happened years earlier. 

In my hospital room the next day.

The morning of February 3^rd, a lady came in early and did an echocardiogram.  She could not believe how little damage was done to my heart.  She also warned me to not shovel snow again and that I probably shouldn’t mow grass either.  I begged the cardiologist to let me go home on that Sunday so I could watch the Super Bowl in my basement and not on a tiny TV in the hospital.  I was doing better than he expected, so he let me go home.  Instead of the pizza and wings I planned on eating for the big game, I had a bowl of unsalted almonds.  Talk about a big letdown.  But this was the beginning of my new life. 

Walking out of the hospital.

Coming within a few minutes of my demise has most certainly been a wake-up call.  I went to cardio rehab, which I will get into in future posts, and finished it.  I have been going to the maintenance program since early July 2019.  I have exercised more since my heart attack than I have since I played football.  I am not on a strict diet but do much better than I did.  I have lowered my A1C by a full point and am no longer considered pre-diabetic.  I have lost a lot of fat and gained quite a bit of muscle.  I struggled with my sleep for about two months after my heart attack.  I would get a little anxious with every twinge in my chest or ache in my shoulder.  Once I started cardiac rehab, I began to sleep much better.  In October, my heart went out of rhythm.  During my first stress test at the hospital, I came close to going into cardiac arrest.  The next day, I was back in the heart catherization lab.  Everything looked good and the blockage in my widowmaker actually decreased from the time of my heart attack 8 months earlier. The cardiologist credited my diet changes and hard work at cardiac rehab for the improvement.

After a workout at cardiac rehab 5 months later.

I am so thankful to be alive.  I have never appreciated life as much as I do now.  I don’t let the small stuff bother me anymore.  Life is too short to get worked up over petty things.  Lisa and I look back at the events of that day.  I am so fortunate that it worked out the way it did.  Had we not had that snow, Lisa would have come home at her normal time and she likely would have found me dead.  I am confident that I would have been too stubborn to call 911. If Lisa would have listened to me and not called 911, I likely would have died. If the EMTs would have taken me to the hospital that my insurance covered, I likely would have not made it.  If the catherization team was not already at the hospital working on another emergency, my life likely would have ended that night.  I am so thankful that Lisa did not listen to me and called 911 (I know she will hold that over my head for the rest of my life!).  I am thankful that God had His hand on me and worked everything out. He is not done with me yet in this life.  

As Lisa has posted many times on social media, “let our wake-up call be your wake-up call.”  Make it a priority to exercise at least three times a week.  Make some adjustments to your diet.  If you smoke, quit.  I have had no less than ten medical professionals assume that I was a heavy smoker.  It is what usually causes these catastrophic heart attacks.  Finally, pay attention to what medical issues run in your family.  If your family members have battled heart disease, you need to take this seriously.  Let our wake-up call be your wake-up call!


Please Note:  Not all heart attack symptoms are the same.  This from Mayo Clinic:

Common heart attack signs and symptoms include:

• Pressure, tightness, pain, or a squeezing or aching sensation in your chest or arms that may spread to your neck, jaw or back
• Nausea, indigestion, heartburn or abdominal pain
• Shortness of breath
• Cold sweat
• Fatigue
• Lightheadedness or sudden dizziness

Heart attack symptoms vary

Not all people who have heart attacks have the same symptoms or have the same severity of symptoms. Some people have mild pain; others have more severe pain. Some people have no symptoms; for others, the first sign may be sudden cardiac arrest. However, the more signs and symptoms you have, the greater the likelihood you're having a heart attack.

Some heart attacks strike suddenly, but many people have warning signs and symptoms hours, days or weeks in advance. The earliest warning might be recurrent chest pain or pressure (angina) that's triggered by exertion and relieved by rest. Angina is caused by a temporary decrease in blood flow to the heart.

When to see a doctor

Act immediately. Some people wait too long because they don't recognize the important signs and symptoms. Take these steps: