A lucky heart

Think you can spot somebody on the street who’s one jelly doughnut away from a heart attack?

Overweight guy. Probably older. Maybe he’s balding. He’s likely puffing on a cigarette with one hand while hefting a fast-food bag with the other. Wouldn’t be surprising if his dad dropped dead of a massive coronary at 40.

That is the stereotype.

And then there is Michael Fortney, who fits none of those descriptions. Fortney is tall and slender, with a blond buzz cut and the open, boyish face of a Midwestern farm boy (though he spent his childhood in Southern California, before moving to this area some 20 years ago).

He’s 43, doesn’t smoke, eats pretty well, and gave up drinking years ago. Up until a few years ago, he was a competitive runner. He bikes and fishes and water-skis. He has no family history of heart disease.

Too bad Michael Fortney’s heart didn’t care about statistics.

Had that been the case, the Spokane man wouldn’t have wound up in a heart catheterization lab at Deaconess Medical Center, where his heart stopped beating on its own for nearly half an hour.

“He didn’t have any of those risk factors,” says Dr. Tom Tobin, an emergency room physician at Deaconess who was on call when Fortney was brought in. “He didn’t even have the family history. … He’s just unlucky, for lack of any other explanation.”

Fortney had only been with the Airway Heights Fire Department for two weeks last March 16 and was suited up and ready for his first training drill.

Fortney was the “hydrant man” that rainy evening when the firetruck rumbled up to a warehouse, lights flashing. His job was to jump off the truck, pull off the five-inch hose and hook it to the hydrant. Once he’d connected everything, he’d loosen the valve and let the water flow.

“And that’s when I started feeling the fatigue, the breathing, the pain in my chest,” he says.

But Fortney actually had been feeling a little off for about three months. He’d do some yard work and wind up drenched in sweat. He felt lethargic and tired all the time.

“I told my wife, ‘I just don’t feel right,’ ” he says.

So he had a physical and checked out just fine.

But everything most certainly was not fine with Fortney as he entered that warehouse during the training exercise.

As part of the drill, he was breathing oxygen from a pack. Nine minutes into the drill, the alarm went off on Fortney’s pack. He had run out of air from a bottle that was supposed to last 20 minutes.

His partner told him to slow down his breathing, that he was hyperventilating.

“I said, ‘I can’t breathe. I’m getting dizzy. I feel sick,’ ” Fortney recalls.

Anybody who knew Fortney would know that something must’ve been very wrong for him to make a fuss, says Todd Kirwin, an Airway Heights firefighter who was working on the medic truck that night.

“He tends to be kind of an overachiever,” says Kirwin. “If something is bothering him or something’s wrong, he won’t talk about it.”

But Fortney, who worked for nine years as a nurses’ aide, knew very well what was happening.

“I’ve got the sharp chest pain like someone just hit me with a two-by-four,” he says. “I knew myself what was going on. I knew I was having a heart attack.”

Even so, when the medic started giving him nitroglycerine and aspirin to chew and the ambulance raced down the highway and he heard the driver radio in with a “possible M.I.” – a myocardial infarction, or heart attack – Fortney couldn’t believe it.

“I’m going, ‘No. I can’t be having a heart attack,’ ” he says.

Turns out, he wasn’t just having a heart attack.

“He basically came in with sort of one of the worst heart attacks you can have,” says Dr. Dieter Lubbe, the cardiologist on call at Deaconess that night.

Fortney’s left anterior descending artery, which supplies blood to the front of the heart, was completely blocked.

That’s bad enough, but things were about to get much worse.

Fortney needed an angioplasty to clear the blockage, so he was wheeled up to the procedure room. He remembers sliding onto the table and being prepped. And that’s it.

“I decided to flat-line,” he says in his no-nonsense way.

His heart lurched into a dangerous rhythm, ventricular fibrillation, and stopped beating.

“When this happens at home, it’s basically nonsurvivable,” Lubbe says. “This particular rhythm is not treatable with any other mechanism other than a shock.

“They pass out within 10 seconds unless someone does CPR. Most patients will die in a matter of minutes.”

Fortney may have been highly unlucky to have a heart attack, but he certainly was lucky to be in the right place at the right time when his heart stopped beating.

Lubbe knew he had a good chance of saving Fortney if he could just open up that artery. Meanwhile, one of the nurses continued CPR, another kept up with the electrical shocks, and Tobin – when he could find a break in the action – inserted a tube down Fortney’s throat to help him breathe.

“It was pretty hectic,” Tobin says.

But as the minutes dragged on, the mood got more and more bleak.

“When this was going on for 20 minutes, some of us in the room were getting a little despondent,” Lubbe says. “When someone has cardiac standstill, you have a window of maybe the first 15 minutes. If you don’t recover someone in 15 minutes, generally you don’t.”

It took 23 minutes and 47 shocks, but Fortney came back to life.

“Somebody needs to invent a word to tell somebody how much you appreciate them starting your heart up,” Fortney says.

“I got a second chance. I’ve always given to people and I never expected anything in return, and God gave me a second chance.”

Fortney has tried to find ways to show his appreciation, though.

He’s become certified as an emergency medical technician. And he’s taking the courses necessary to begin paramedic training next fall at Spokane Community College.

He still works at the firehouse, and he volunteers in the emergency room at Deaconess.

He knows now to take it easy, rest if he feels fatigued and go straight to the ER if he has any chest pain. His diet includes more chicken and vegetables and less prime rib and steak.

But doctors say his quick treatment spared his heart any permanent damage and he can expect to live a fairly normal life.

Fortney says with a hint of a smirk:

“Just because you have a heart attack and die, it’s not the end of the world.”