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Back to New World Finn Home Page A Matter
Of One’s Heart
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Back to New World Finn Home Page
A Matter Of One’s Heart
By Gerry Luoma Henkel
Editor of NWF
On the Saturday night of this past Memorial Day weekend I survived a major heart attack. That same day it would be safe to say that at least 3000 other people in the USA also had a heart attack, and maybe 1300 of those individuals died. I was lucky to survive, given the way that I handled the attack - which I will write about momentarily.
First, some facts. The American Heart Association says that there are 1,100,000 new and recurrent cases of coronary attack per year; over 44 percent die. Their source for this statistic is the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Atherosclerotic Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study, 1987-94.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the rate of heart disease is declining in general worldwide and people nowadays have a much better chance of surviving a heart attack than in the past. However, it estimates that by the year 2020, up to 40% of all deaths will be related to cardiovascular diseases or heart disease.
A recent WHO study (known as the MONICA project) was the largest community-based study of heart disease ever undertaken. The study monitored seven million people and 170,000 heart attacks around the world. It tracked heart attack rates, blood pressure, risk factors such as blood cholesterol, smoking and body weight, and coronary care in 37 countries for 10 years between the mid – 1980s and the mid – 1990s.
The greatest decline in heart disease was experienced in three northern European areas: North Karelia (Finland), (which had one of the highest levels at the start of the study), Kuopio (Finland), and northern Sweden. The decline is attributable to a large reduction in risk factors in these countries.
In the images below, the top one - preballoon angioplasty - shows where one of the major blockages in my heart occured. The lower one shows how the stent opened up blood flow to the rest of my heart - thanks to cardiologist Dr. Stephen Bernard's and his staff's diligent work.
But numbers and statistics rarely make a difference to us. Most of us figure we are not a part of those statistics. The fact is, however, that we are the ones who make up the statistics and numbers - you and I, my family, your family, my friends, your friends. It comes home to us when we are the ones who have the experience of the pain, the ride to the hospital in an ambulance, the nurses, surgeons, operating rooms, and finally the long lonely nights in a narcotic fog in the hospital.
As I mentioned above, my heart attack began on the Saturday night of the Memorial Day weekend.
During the day I had worked in the kantele shop, and then I drove into town to pick up a couple things at the grocery store. One item I bought was some Cherry Garcia ice cream. That evening I managed to eat the whole pint while reading my emails and answering them. Then my friend, Ulla, called from New York, and we talked about her trip to Mongolia.
By 10:00 I was feeling a bit strange, almost as if I was getting the flu. By 10:30 I was wondering why my chest was achy - wondering if maybe it was from how I sit at the computer sometimes for hours.
By 11 p.m. I was in bed. The pain in my chest had increased, and I was feeling like I wanted to vomit - very nauseous. The pain was intense, and it was pressing in on me. This was familiar – I remembered well the feeling from ten years before when I was in bed, and the elephant climbed the ladder to my sleeping loft and sat down on my chest. That's when I had my first heart attack.
By 12:30 I had no relief, but I kept thinking that maybe it was indigestion, although inside myself, I suspected that it was an attack.
So what? I said to myself. Dying is not so bad. I was looking it right in the face, and I was not fearful, and in some ways it was appealing.
I did start thinking about who I could call. My neighbor, Doug, was closest, another friend was Jana, a couple miles away. I even thought maybe I should just call my friends just to tell them I thought I was dying, and that I loved them.
Then I decided that maybe I could fall asleep, like that time ten years ago. But no matter how much I tried to relax and flow into a peaceful, painless place, it would not happen. I tried this for a couple of hours, and it is possible that I did doze off once or twice for a few minutes.
But by 5:30 in the morning I realized that "it" was not going away, and the pain was still horrendous. (I can understand if you are rolling your eyes around in your head as you read this and are thinking of me as - well let me be blunt - stupid. You are right. The rule about what to do when you have a heart attack, is to get to the hospital as soon as you can - within minutes if possible. All I can say in my weak attempt to defend myself, is that since I've been hanging out with other men in Cardiac Rehab sessions and talking about our experiences, what I was doing was not unusual.)
Let me expand on my "stupidity": I looked around at my cabin and realized how disorderly it was, and how it needed a cleaning. I decided that I should do something to make it acceptable just in case someone had to come here and let my cat, Kettu, outside if I ended up in the hospital. Two or three hours later, still in pain, I had managed to tidy up most of the main area. Then I sat down at the computer and answered my emails and organized the work that I had to do with NWF and the Kantele Shop.
Finally I heated some water and took a bath in the sauna, put on some clean clothes, brushed my teeth, and checked a website that talked about heart attacks. Yep, from everything I could see that's what had happened to me. And I was still having horrible pain all the time.
I then called the hospital in Two Harbors and asked the nurse who answered my call what I should do. She simply suggested I ought to get to the hospital. The website had said that someone who is having a heart attack should not drive. Since I had already broken every other rule about what to do when you have a heart attack, I broke that one too.
I could write much more. I could write about the enormous amounts and varieties of drugs and narcotics they gave me to take away the pain, but how it just kept on coming. I could write about the wild ride in the ambulance, with a nurse holding my hand all the way from Two Harbors to Duluth. I could write about the conversations I had with the nurses and cardiologist, while they were running wires up my arteries and inserting brand new drug-coated stents into my heart. (In the images above, the top one - preballoon angioplasty - shows where one of the major blockages in my heart occured. The lower one shows how the stent opened up blood flow to the rest of my heart.) I could write about the wonderful nurses who kept waking me up at night just to make sure everything was okay with me. I could write about the exercise physiologists who have helped me regain my stamina. I could write about the $45,000 cost of my Memorial Day weekend.
But instead of going on and on about my personal experience, let me leave it at this: do what is necessary to avoid having a heart attack. The North Karelia Project has demonstrated what we can do, and many other people (for instance, one of my favorites - Dean Ornish) have also given us programs to follow that will keep us from an attack and heart disease.
Here's what they say: eat vegetables and fruits, go for long walks with good friends or a happy dog, pet the cat, rejoice in sunny days and rainy days, do yoga, pray for peace, practice smiling, make music. And, for people like me who always want to change the world, lighten up - it will change.