The Day My World Stopped

In the ambulance, looking at the ceiling, I knew for certain I was going to die.

It was work weekend at the cabin, Labor Day weekend in 2025. My brother and I prepared to rip the gable end siding off the cabin and replace it with cedar shakes. The siding was old and possibly had asbestos in it, so we wore full face masks with P100 filters and disposable hazmat looking like suits. We weren’t taking any chances.

Tear off went quick and soon enough we were hauling a few bags of siding up to the garage. That’s when I first felt a little out of breath when I otherwise should not have been out of breath. At this time, I just chalked it up to being in a full face mask for the last hour. As the day rolled on, this happened a few more times. I’d walk to the garage and feel a little bit out of breath. I told my wife and mother that something is going on and mentioned I might have to get it checked out this week. I recently spoke with a friend that had a stent put in last year and he mentioned having these symptoms for a few months, so I didn’t think anything was critical. I was wrong.

This is labor day weekend and we managed to get the cedar shakes up on Saturday. On Sunday, my wife, brother, and son left. My brother had to catch a plane from Duluth to Chicago. In the early afternoon, I decided to go fill up our water tank. There is a 300 gallon stainless steel tank we use for water at the cabin when the lake is murky. The water source is about two miles away from the cabin, so I hopped in the side by side with two 50 gallon barrels in the attached trailer

That’s when I knew something was very wrong. I stepped out of the side by side and while walking to the spigot, I felt a little dizzy and very out of breath. Immediately, I hopped back into the side by side and raced back to the cabin. I parked the side by side, and yelled to my mom, “WE HAVE TO GO!!!”, she knew what I was talking about and called 911. She told the operator that we would drive to the highway, a 12 mile dirt road drive, and if they weren’t there, she would keep going.

We jumped into her Subaru, I put the seat back. At this time, I felt what could be described as heart burn and really out of breath. During the drive I told my mom, I’ve had a good life, sorry this is happening, and tell everyone I love them. This was not easy for her to hear, but I think she was driving that back dirt road at 100mph.

We reached the highway in record time and there was a sheriff’s truck there already with the lights flashing. The sheriff said the ambulance was 30 seconds away. Sure enough, a few seconds later the ambulance pulled up and I was being put on a stretcher. We started racing off with lights and sirens blaring. Then, after about 10 minutes of driving we pulled over to the side of the road and were just sitting there. This made me perplexed as to why we stopped.

At this point, I knew I was going to die. I had no doubt in my heart, but oddly enough I was at peace with this outcome. At 49 years old, I have lived a full life. Multiple children that all love me and my wife. Traveled to many parts of the world. Eaten great food, climbed mountains, camped a billion times, mountain biked, hiked, played basketball, soccer, and pickle ball. My career was satisfying and doing well. I had no regrets. So I bowed my head, asked for forgiveness for my sins and that Jesus would accept my soul into heaven. Then I passed out or they gave me something to put me out, I don’t know.

…

Time passed, but I was unaware or even conscious. Then, I heard my wife’s voice. “Stay calm Shane, just stay calm. The doctor has agreed to perform this only if you stay calm.” So I did, my eyes were still closed, I was aware that I was in some sort of hospital setting. I had no recollection why I was even there. At this time, I had a tube down my throat, kind of uncomfortable. Much of it is a blur, but after a short while, they took the tube out of my throat. The rest of the day, I slowly became more aware of what happened, where I was at, and my current condition.

Going back to the ambulance on the side of the road. The EMTs in the ambulance met up with a paramedic. The paramedic diagnosed that I was having a major heart attack, the “Widow Maker”, this is when your left anterior descending artery (LAD) is 100% block. That artery delivers 50% of the blood your heart receives. A big deal. The paramedic decided that I needed to go to Duluth for treatment, which is about 2 hours away normal driving. I don’t know how long it took or how fast we were going but my mom attempted to follow the ambulance and was unable to keep up.

I arrived at Duluth Essentia Emergency Room, and they rushed me into the operating room. Within about 30 minutes they had a stent put in my heart to open up the blockage. However, it was pumping very weak, so to give my heart some rest, they put me into an induced coma. Also during this time, they put a balloon in my heart to help it pump. I was on a ventilator for a while. I have been shown some pictures and videos of me in the coma and it was not a pretty sight.

While in the coma I had pneumonia twice, and developed a blood clot in my lungs. Also, I became allergic to a medication they were giving me and broke out in large welts on my arm and hip. They attempted to wake me from the coma once, but I was too agitated and they put me back under.

I remember nothing from the coma… However

I think in the coma, your brain is still active, and you can probably hear, but you’re also high on some super powerful drugs. So with that combination, during the coma, I developed a myriad of memories that simply didn’t happen. Unlike dreams, these were much more real and only slightly outlandish in some circumstances. It’s as if my brain was creating some fantastic stories and placing them in my memory bank. Some of the memories feel like they happened way before the heart attack.

One such memory, I was in the hospital and was being sedated against my will. I tried to tell my wife, that we cannot trust the nurses. So I wrote it on a small note to give to her, but one of the nurses ended up with the note. This displeased them, so they wheeled me to a machine that would wipe certain memories from my mind. What really happened, I was probably getting a CT scan. So I might have been hearing what was going on, but my mind was making a more fantastical story out of the actual facts.

I probably have a dozen such memories that I can vividly recall, but they obviously never happened.

Even after coming out of the coma, the next day I was hallucinating that something was wrong and they were having to perform some emergency procedure. A few days later, I asked my wife, what was wrong with me that they did that. Her response… that never happened.

Two weeks in a coma is devastating

When I entered the hospital for the heart attack, I was almost 260 pound, yeah, I was fat. When I finally left the hospital I was 225. I had lost 35 pounds in just a few short weeks. Most of it was muscle. I read you lose 2% of your muscle for every day you’re in a coma. I was in one for over 14 days. What’s very depressing, is I had been weight lifting religiously for the last three years and had some good sized arms, chest, and legs. After two weeks in a coma, all gone. My legs were thin, my arms just toothpicks, my chest sunken in. Seems so lop sided. It took over three years to work up to where I was, and only two weeks to completely reset my weight lifting progress.

Oh, did I mention, I had to learn how to walk again. Turns out, not using your legs for more than two weeks, meant my strength and balance were very poor. A few days after coming out of the coma, they had me stand with a walker and take a few steps. I was exhausted after just a little amount and needed to sit back down on the bed. Each day, they roused me out of bed and had me walk further and further.

For the first few days out of the coma, I didn’t have very much strength at all. My wife fed me as I was just too weak and uncoordinated to hold a utensil or grab hold of a cup. By the third day, I was able to hold a can of Ginger Ale, but had to really struggle to bring it to my mouth properly.

Some weird side affects

Side affects or is it side effects? In any case, some weird things happened after the coma. I remember two days after coming out of the coma, trying to use my phone was very frustrating, it seemed like I was hitting the buttons on the phone, but it wouldn’t work as expected. I suspect the drugs were causing a little hand eye coordination interruption. I don’t know, but I do remember getting home and noticing some small shaking in my fingers when using my phone or when writing with a pen. It seems to be going away with time.

The other weird thing, I had this weird feeling on both feet between my big toe and the one next to it. Imaging wearing some flip flop sandals, you know the ones with a thong lodged between your big toe and the next one. It felt numb ALL THE TIME. It felt like there was something between my toes all the time. Over time, the right one went back to normal. The left foot still has the sensation, but less pronounced. I’m hoping it will all go away with time.

A week of inpatient therapy

After four days in the hospital, I was ready to be discharged, but they highly recommend I go to inpatient therapy. During my week of inpatient therapy, we worked on many things both physical and mental. The physical was obvious, the mental issues not so much. During therapy, I worked every day on walking and balance. By the end of the week I was walking without a walker and able to go up and down stairs.

The mental tell. My first day in therapy, they had me take a number of tests. One was “I’m going to give you a letter, you have 60 seconds to come up with as many things that starting with letter”. She then said, “the letter ‘M’, GO!”. I was able to come up with about 5 words pretty quickly, then my mind was blank. I sat there not able to come up with suitable words starting with “M”. It was embarrassing. So for the rest of the week, I did numerous mind puzzles stretching my critical thinking, and some I think I would have struggled with before the coma. The were brutal taskmasters. One had me manually entering in checks and balancing a checking account. I said “Who does that anymore?”. Another time, they had me creating a manual calendar with schedules of employees who worked all different hours each day of the month.

Sure enough, at the end of the week, I was acing these tests and had my critical thinking chops back for the most part. It probably took another week to slid back into some of the things I was doing before like computer programming, deploying code, and other activities on the computer.

Sodium

I have to limit my sodium intake to 2000mg a day and limit my liquid intake to about 2 liters a day. If I drink too much, or eat too much sodium, my body will retain the water and will increase the volume of blood in my veins, which in turn is harder on my heart to pump. It has to pump more fluid. Because of this, I use the MyFitnessPal to track all my food to keep track of how much sodium items contain. Pickles: high in sodium, most canned items: high in sodium, cheese: high in sodium (with the rare exception of Swiss cheese), most breads have a fair amount of sodium, deli meats and ham: high in sodium.

I was traveling one day, and not tracking my food intake. I had a Subway sandwich with provolone cheese and a small amount of mac and cheese as well as other items I didn’t know the sodium content. The next day, as my body started to absorb the sodium, I started to feel lethargic and the day after I gained almost three pounds overnight. This is a solid indication of water retention. All day, my heart hurt just a little bit and I had no energy. This was a scary experience which I learned can be countered with a higher does of Lasix (Furosemide - a drug which makes you pee more).

Eating out is a challenge. After reviewing the nutritional menu for most restaurants, you quickly see sodium is over the top for many items. I’ve seen some menu items containing more than 1600mg of sodium. Most restaurant food, not just fast food, is loaded with saturated fats, sodium, and sugar. No wonder Americans are obese. The foods we eat have an abundant amount of one of those three offenders.

I discovered another pleasant side effect of not eating out and eating a very healthy low sodium diet. I eat far fewer calories and I’m not really hungry at all, even though I’m eating every few hours. Just smaller amounts. The food I eat is made from scratch containing very little sodium. The fewer calories means I’m losing weight, something I struggled to do for much of my adult life. In the last three weeks I’ve lost about five pounds and continue to drop a little each day.

No stamina

The toughest thing today is getting tired fast. I can walk up two flights of stairs and I need to take a little rest. I can walk about a half mile, then I need a small rest. I’ll start some Cardio Rehab in a few weeks which I think will just try to push me and get my heart really thumping.

Random thoughts

The Apple Watch heart monitor is really great. Comes in handy all the time when I’m exercising.
Being on two blood thinners is dangerous and I’m hoping to get off one of them ASAP. I cut myself with a knife a few days ago, just a small pin prick of a cut would have normally clotted in 5 minutes. Thirty minutes later it was still seeping blood. I called the nurse online and she recommended holding a cloth on it for 10 minutes straight (no peaking). This worked, but took 45 minutes for me to get it to stop. I have to be very careful not to hit my head could be fatal. So no biking, stay off ladders, and other activities involving possibly getting bruised up.
Sleep has been a struggle some nights. Since I lost so much mass, my shoulders are bare bones and get sore during the night. So I toss and turn trying to find a position which doesn’t make my shoulders hurt. I also wake up drenched in sweat if I don’t have my arms above the covers. If I’m too covered up, I get hot and start to sweat. Kind of miserable to wake up with a wet pillow and sheets.
Eating out is very rare now. On the plus side as mentioned before, I’m losing weight.
I have a second chance at life and will forever remember what happened on Sunday August 31, 2025.
Drinking is a thing of the past. I used to drink 3-4 drinks a week, but I don’t need alcohol anymore.