My heart attack story, Part 2 - The Emergency Room & the helicopter

 The last post left off with me walking from the walk-in center to the emergency room as I was having a heart attack.

So I walked across the parking lot, through a little alleyway along some chain link fence around remodeling work being done on a building the the parking lot of the hospital, and around the corner to the ER.

When I walked in, they started to ask how they could help me (which in retrospect makes me wonder if the walk-in center people had called them to let them know a guy having chest pains was on the way, it doesn't seem like it in 20/20 hindsight) and I just blurted out that I was having chest pains. It was a very different response here than at the walk-in center. People started scrambling.

Suddenly I was in a wheelchair being rolled through the ER to a stall down at the end. Actually being AT the ER made the building sense of panic subside, so I thought that maybe this was all just stupid after all and is maybe gas. A doctor showed up and started asking questions about the pain and other symptoms. Since there were no other symptoms and the pain kinda moved around a lot as opposed to being centered in the upper left chest, he was thinking that maybe it wasn't a cardiac event, but let's get me hooked up to some monitoring equipment to be sure and maybe find out what is going on.

I started to feel a little embarrassed but just rolled with it, hoping that I had done something stupid like pop a rib out of it's socket while swinging a hammer under the van and that this whole thing wasn't just a trapped bubble of fart.

As the doctor left the stall, the nurse who had wheeled me in took over. She was nice, she was calm. I got the feeling that even if this was all just a trapped fart and let it rip, she wouldn't even roll her eyes about it.

They had me take my shirt off and lay back on a table to attach EKG pads to me in various places. There was a younger GenZ looking girl there who seemed like a trainee or maybe a med student who was given the task of doing this while the nurse did something off to my right side, I think she was getting me set up with a blanket and pillow. Where she was working, she didn't have a clear view of the monitor because the overhead light reflected off the screen. This is important to the story.

I guess I need to point out that I am only slightly less furry than a wookie, so EKG pads aren't just going to stick. It took a while for the trainee to figure this out. Then she fumbled for a while with bandage scissors to trim chunks of chest hair away to sorta get the pads to stick. She was not particularly good at this task but eventually got them on and hooked the wires up.

Once fully connected, the nurse moved from where she had been standing to down near my legs so she could get a better look at the monitor now that I was all wired in. She went from casually looking up at the screen to standing straight upright and blurted out "OH SHIT!" and ran out of the stall to get the doctor.

When the medical professional who is overseeing your well being in the ER yells "OH SHIT!", that is a good indicator that things have gone pretty sideways.

Now everyone became quite animated. Except me, of course, because all I had to do was lay there and watch the drama unfold. The doctor came in and told me that I was having a heart attack, that it was "really bad", and that they were flying me to the major hospital 25 miles to the north where they have a state of the art cardiac wing, then went out of the stall in a hurry.

More people were suddenly sticking more sensors to me, someone took my shoes and socks off and put them in a bag with my shirt and jacket. The thought flashed through my head of the night my grandfather was killed in a house fire and the doctor brought out a plastic bag with his rings, keys, and wallet in it to give me.

Someone broke out a cordless hair trimmer to make clean spots for more sensors, the battery died so they went to scissors and disposable razors. The fact that my body hair killed the battery on the ER's hair trimmer is something that I'll laugh about for the rest of my life.

I turned to the nurse and said "I should probably call my wife and tell her what is going on, huh?" She replied "YES! Call your wife!" At the time, my wife and youngest daughter were house & dog sitting for a friend a town or two away.

I spoke to her on the phone, she seemed fairly calm and they headed to the hospital, arriving shortly before the chopper got there.

Throughout this, I never really felt fear. To this day I find that fascinating. There was some near-panic that was more of uncertainty knowing that if I screw something up like taking a wrong turn on the way to the hospital, it could have dire consequences, but the idea of actually dying, the reality that these could be my last moments on Earth, did not give me any fear or worry. My job here in this moment was done: I had gotten to the ER, called Wendy and what happens next is up to God, the skills of doctors, and technology...all out of my hands. I was ready for whatever came next and I was cool with whatever it was going to be.

The chopper crew came in, all dressed in thick insulated black flight suits. They were a bit worn looking and seemed a little dirty. This gave me the feeling that these folks don't screw around and jump into the fray to get the job done. They added their own stick on sensors and defibrillation pads and theirs stuck better. In fact, when I found the defib pads still stuck to me a few days later and pulled them off, one of them took a silver dollar sized chunk of skin with it.

They slid me onto their stretcher, had me cross my hands at my waist and wrapped me in a thick, solid black blanket before strapping me down with just my face showing. It occurred to me that the blanket was kind of like a shroud. They wheeled me out into the dark night and stopped for a moment for my wife and daughter to give me a goodbye kiss before shoving me into the back of the chopper.

The crew scrambled in. I was disappointed that none of them were door gunners. They fired up the engine and started the preflight takeoff routine. The crew members sitting at my head and to my left hooked up my wires to their equipment and put on helmets. I asked the one to my left "Hey, don't I get a helmet?' but she didn't hear me because chopper engines are pretty loud. Made a mental note to myself that if I was ever going to be life-flighted again to bring my own flight helmet (of course I have one from the early Cold War era).

The machine shuddered as the engine speed increased, then it lifted off the ground and tilted forward to begin it's 150+ MPH trip to the hospital in the next county 25 miles away.

There were no speakers blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" like in the battle scene in Apocalypse Now, so I just chuckled to myself as it played in my head. If chances were good that I wouldn't live to see the thing land, I may as well entertain myself.

This was not my first time in a helicopter, but given the circumstances, it was certainly the most exciting.

The medical center operates four of the medivac choppers in various parts of the state. They cost $5 million each and have saved countless lives.

The hospital staff told my wife that if they had transported me by regular ground ambulance, I wouldn't have made it. This was a close call.

As luck would have it, a friend of a friend happened to be visiting his Mom in the first hospital and when he was leaving, stopped to get some video of the helicopter that the crew had just shoved someone into the back of. After discussing the time at which the video was shot, my buddy figured out it was me they had just loaded into the chopper on a stretcher so there is actually video of the lifesaving machine starting up and taking off.

It's just under 3 minutes long. I uploaded it to youtube and you can see it here.

(continued in Part 3)