Bill Isles, Duluth, MN – 41 at time of event (1993)
Memorial day 1993, Bill went to sleep with a slight chest pain. It was nothing to worry about; he’d been practicing hurdles with his high-school track-star daughter that day and must have pulled a muscle. A few days later the pain returned, after a run. By the end of the week he didn’t feel healthy at all, and wandered into the local Walgreens to check his condition on their free blood-pressure machine. It was OK, but he decided to go home and lie down for while, instead of returning to the office.
Lying on the sofa while his youngest daughter was busy in the kitchen, Bill heard a voice inside his head saying, “You don’t want to be one of those guys that won’t go in, do ya?” He called out to say he was going to get checked out at the hospital. His young daughter came over and said, “You’re not having a heart attack, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Bill replied, holding his chest for the pain. He didn’t call 9-1-1. He drove alone to the local emergency room, only a few miles down the road. It was on a one-way street and he caught all green lights, but the pain had not abated by the time he went in. One look by the triage nurse and Bill was hooked up to an EKG monitor and told to lie still. The ER doctor began asking the usual risk factor questions, and Bill passed out. The monitor showed spontaneous ventricular fibrillation. One shock and Bill woke up. But, he realized that something was different. He had an oxygen mask on, and everyone was looking very serious. The doctor explained he had just suffered a cardiac arrest. Bill immediately thought, “I just died!”
“I remember laying there, before my family arrived, and thinking ‘my life could have been over right then.’ Everything I would’ve done in my life would have been finished. That was the end of my story.” Bill said in wonder. “Then I thought, ‘but, here I am, still alive, and who knows how much longer, maybe five minutes or fifty years?’” So he made a pledge to change his life and do something creative again, saying to himself, “If I live thru this, I am not going to continue to live my life the way it was.”
Bill’s eldest daughter worked as a volunteer at this hospital and, seeing the oxygen mask, realized how serious the situation was. Bill recalls the family discussing how to help reduce the stress and pressure in his life. “She was getting married that summer and there they were in the ER, talking about how the wedding plans could be scaled back!” Bill said with a chuckle. “How could they have known how much pressure I’d been under?” Unfortunately their sentiments couldn’t alleviate Bill’s heart problems in the short term. “My daughter said that I looked deathly grey, like someone had turned the color off on the TV.” He was sent to the catheterization lab, where his blocked left circumflex artery was opened with a stent. Bill was only mildly sedated and therefore able to see the procedure on a monitor. He watched the lead wire being inserted into his heart, and the contrast agent as it was injected into his arteries. Once they released the balloon used to compress the plaque that was blocking his artery, Bill suddenly felt better. “It was like life got blasted into me!” The color returned to his face and he was instantly normal again. There was no lasting damage to his heart muscle, despite the length of time of reduced blood flow.
Bill is now an expert in recognizing the symptoms of plaque blockages. He has since had three more instances, and has a total of six stents holding open his coronary arteries. “It’s not that different from heartburn. One thing I watch for is my stamina.” If he feels unusually out of breath, or physically exhausted, it is a sure sign. “One time, we were staying in a B&B, and I walked up the stairs and had to sit down and rest. I said ‘That’s not right, I shouldn’t be feeling this way’.”
A singer/songwriter now, Bill has a wonderfully humorous attitude. “Probably all my songs are about it,” Bill replied when I asked if he had a song dedicated to the event. “I tend to have happy ending songs*. I appreciate life so much and want to pass that onto my audiences.”
-Jeremy Whitehead
* Bill &Kate Isles regularly tour the country, checkout their songs and CDs here (www.billisles.com)