Life in Richmond's been busy. Everything's scheduled.
Yeah. It's wild and crazy most of the time.
It was just a normal day, and we were going to Cincinnati to spend the afternoon, evening with our other kids. And I knew I wasn't gonna get to the Y, so I said, I'm gonna go to the sauna. Literally within five minutes, I I knew something was up.
I asked Mendy if we had any, heartburn medication. And she said, Why? You never have heartburn. We were stopping on the way at the boat dealership to pick up a trailer, and we got over to the dealership.
And I said to Mendy, I said, I don't feel I don't feel like getting this thing out right now. And she said, well, let's go to the hospital. Something's wrong. So I said, maybe if I drink this water, get a little bit of rest, you drive, I'll sleep a little bit.
So she stops in Lexington in Hamburg to get some heartburn medication for me. And while she was there, she actually got baby aspirin too.
I get the baby aspirin thinking that it is something related to his heart. And so we end up going on. I did a lot of praying from, to up to Cincinnati.
Next morning, she gave me more of the baby aspirin, and we drove home. I said, I'm gonna take my blood pressure. And I took my blood pressure. It was like one seventy eight over one fifteen.
I said, you know, we should probably just go.
When he arrived, his EKG, showed really that, he had more or less completed his heart attack, but he was having ongoing chest symptoms, which prompted us to do a heart catheterization. And sure enough, the artery to the front of his heart was a hundred percent blocked with a blood clot.
Doctor Breeding is showing me the picture of the blockage and he said, everything in your life has to change now.
My mom has had colon cancer. My grandmother died from colon cancer. I've been doing screenings for fifteen years. I thought, how crazy is that?
That I was that concerned with one aspect of health, but not really my entire health.
And I thought, it's kinda like going in and saying, you know, change the brakes on my car, but I don't want you to touch the oil. Don't worry about that. We'll never change the oil.
If you have had a heart attack, and it was treated with a stent or bypass surgery, you get the benefit of that procedure, but you get additional benefit by following through with the cardiac rehab.
Not only do they teach you how to exercise in a way that's maximally beneficial for your heart, it's done in a controlled environment, so there's less anxiety about starting an exercise routine because your levels are all monitored.
I appreciate his perspective really well on on really all the things that he addressed with us in terms of heart health.
We have long recognized that individuals who tend to be very stressed out do have higher instances of cardiac arrest, higher instances of heart attacks, more vascular disease. If it seems in talking to a patient they are leading a very high stress life to try to develop some strategies to control that.
There's a lot of changes, really. One is diet. I think another is the priority on how we handle life, how much we can try to reduce stress. Sometimes family requires more of your time. Sometimes your work requires a little more of your time. But how again you make them work in harmony?
I have had an incredibly good experience at Baptist Health Richmond.
You can trust the services that they'll provide in our local hospital because they have qualified people who care.
I mean, it was really close probably to a totally different outcome.
We're very glad that we got there when we did because they basically said you shouldn't even have walked in the hospital.
It really has given me a new perspective of how fortunate we are.
