Inherently, more backstory details will come out as this blog matures. However, this is the gist:
I was seemingly healthy, 32 years old residing in rural Eastern Montana. On May 6th, 2015 I started my day off much like many of the previous. Fighting cold-like symptoms, feeling like I had pneumonia, feeling too exhausted to move, yet pulling myself to work on time and putting in a full day of work as a loan officer. After work, I fulfilled my duty as a city councilman attending a regular city council meeting running late into the night. As I laid down to try to get some elusive sleep, I realized that if I fell asleep, there was a good chance that I was not going to wake up. It was around midnight and I called my mother who drove me to the emergency room in the next town.
A simple chest X-Ray drew the first serious look on a doctors face I had seen in years when it c
ame to my health along with the murmured words,
“your heart is the size of a football.”
My legs that rivaled an NFL lineman’s were not from cellulitis as previously diagnosed by one physician. It turns out that my anxiety didn’t get worse, that was indeed V-Fib, the anti-anxiety meds were never going to stop it. The hospital that I was at did not have a cardiology team on staff, so immediately I was airlifted to Montana’s largest city, Billings. After over a week of not much more than trying some heart medicines and hoping for the heart to bounce back, the decision was made to refer me to Salt Lake City to an Advanced Heart Failure Team. On May 22, 2015, I received a Left Ventricular Assist Device (or LVAD, [aka Heart Pump]).
