Almost two years ago, my father had a heart attack at the age of ninety-four and had to have major surgery. The symptoms manifested weeks before the surgery in an odd way. He had bad stomach/abdominal pains, not chest pains. Because of this, he wasn’t diagnosed as having heart problems for about a month after the first pains started. It’s important to know that a heart attack can manifest in unusual ways, and it’s frustrating and dangerous when medical professionals don’t recognize it as early as they should. We’re incredibly lucky that he lived through it.
When he first complained of stomach pains, I thought he might be coming down with COVID, but he tested negative. I called his primary care physician (PCP), who thought it was probably just a virus of some kind. The pains subsided, and Dad was okay for a couple of weeks. During those weeks, I had knee replacement surgery. Later, his PCP told us that Dad’s body was “probably trying to have a heart attack then.” Several weeks later, his pains started up again. This time, we went to the doctor’s office where his PCP examined him, decided he probably had an obstruction in his intestines, and sent us directly to the emergency room (ER). Because my knee was still in the very early stages of recuperating from the replacement surgery, I wasn’t supposed to drive; Dad drove us both to his PCP’s office and to the ER.
I hadn’t expected that we’d end up in the hospital, so I didn’t bring any of my pain medications for my knee. While we waited, my knee grew more and more painful, so a kind nurse put me in a wheelchair with my leg extended and raised. She also gave me an ice pack. The ER was extremely crowded. People had stopped wearing masks or worrying about COVID, which caused a large uptick in cases, and the ER was packed with COVID patients along with all the other kinds of emergencies they generally see. The nurses moved us to a back room to keep us separate from the COVID patients, which I appreciated. However, we ended up waiting for about eight hours before they were able to take a variety of tests, none of which were for a heart attack.
They finally decided that he had a urinary tract infection (UTI), which he did, but as his PCP told us later, that was “a red herring,” a distraction, because of which they didn’t look any further. They kept him in the hospital on IV antibiotics for two days, which annoyed him. He was cranky and unpleasant there, probably because he still felt awful. I had to drive his car home from the hospital, no easy feat given the condition of my knee. Unfortunately, a few days after they let Dad go home, the stomach pains came back even worse. It was a weekend, so my brother came home for a few days to help. He took Dad to urgent care, where they took all of his vitals, which were apparently fine, and decided it was just some kind of virus and sent him home.
On Monday dad was in agony with stomach/abdominal pains. My brother spent Sunday night sleeping on the floor in his room because we were so worried about him. We called his PCP, who had him go to his office right away. When he listened to his heart and his pulse, he decided Dad was having a heart attack and sent them immediately to the ER, where the doctor decided he needed surgery, including a stent put in, and sent him to a different local hospital in an ambulance. That hospital specializes in cardiac care and has a huge, new, cardiac care unit.
When the surgeon spoke to us after the surgery, he said, “The surgery went well. We were able to put a stent in. However, given his age, I don’t know if he’s going to survive recovery. There’s a good chance he won’t make it.” One should never underestimate my father because of his age, however.
We went up the elevator to the cardiac intensive care unit to see him, prepared for the worst. When we found Dad’s room in the cardiac ICU, a doctor was standing next to his bed, chatting with him. Dad was telling him about how he worked as an engineer on a computer program that ran the centrifuge that trained the original astronauts. The doctor looked at us and said, “This would have been a different conversation twenty minutes ago, but I think he’s going to heal fine. These next few days are crucial, but he’s strong.” And he did recover.
That same man who annoyed everyone in the other hospital the week before with his crankiness, now had the whole cardiac unit delighted with him as he entertained all of them with tales of the astronauts and his days working for the Johnsville Navy Air Development Center. I watched nurses and doctors stop by saying things like, “Hey, I hear you met Neil Armstrong!” And he’d regale them with a story as he lay in the hospital bed, connected to all kinds of sophisticated equipment, including an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), which pumped blood outside of his body to a heart-lung machine, removing carbon dioxide and sending oxygen-rich blood back to the body. It was terrifying to see him there. He says doesn’t remember much about it; he was heavily drugged, but I can’t forget the sight of him chatting away with nurses and doctors amid all the machines, beeping sounds, and a particularly strong type of antiseptic smell I associate now with fear.
The level of care at the AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, Mainland Campus Cardiac Unit was extraordinary; the nurses and doctors there were extraordinary in their skills, attention, and kindness. Fortunately, thanks to them, several weeks later he was home and back to his usual routine.