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Drawing, February 20, 2007
Beginning at about one thirty in the afternoon on November 3, 2005, I felt a slight pain in my chest as I was sipping a cup of coffee and looking at the computer. About a half hour before, I had finished an hour of snow shoeing in zero degree temperatures.
The pain slowly increased, and I took it as some kind of heartburn from the coffee. The intensity continued to increase. I took some Tums: no effect. I lay down, and took some nitroglycerin. No effect. The pain continued to increase. I interrupted my wife at her work. She found some aspirin, and I swallowed what I could. I thought I was dealing with a bad case of indigestion. I was now bending over, having a hard time catching my breath.
My wife drove me to the hospital, thinking we could get there faster than an ambulance could arrive and take us there. (We should have called the ambulance; they could have alerted the hospital and started medications).
At the hospital, they immediately put in three IV’s and started administering blood thinners to try to break up the blood clot that was causing the heart attack. The chest pain continued to increase, as if the chest were being slowly squeezed, tighter and tighter. After about three hours from the start of the heart attack, my consciousness started fading, and I experienced that gray fog again, as I had five years earlier. I realized, dimly, that this could be the end of my life. I couldn’t believe it.
The order was given to evacuate me to Anchorage by emergency jet, since they did not have a cardiology unit in Fairbanks and they couldn’t do any surgical intervention. On the plane, I was strapped on a gurney, hooked up to EKG machine and oxygen, and was in the presence of my wife, two nurses, two pilots, and some strange dim red light that was always on in the cabin. I thought to myself, This is a new way to travel to Anchorage.
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Somewhere on the plane ride the chest pain went away, and the gray fog lifted.
