Cliff Harrison
Cliff Harrison loves coaching baseball, going to the river and spending time with his family. But a heart attack nearly put an end to all of that. Cliff was on the field coaching his team one evening in July when he started having chest pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. “Just the most enormous pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” he says.
Parents who were on the field and an umpire who had medical training knew Cliff needed help. When EMTs arrived, they could tell Cliff was in trouble. “They picked me up off the bench, put me on the gurney and loaded me in the ambulance,” he recalls. While on the way to Washington Regional’s emergency department, the EMS crew used a special app called PULSARA to relay important information about Cliff’s condition to the emergency room, which then alerted the cardiac catheterization team that a patient with a heart attack was being transported to the hospital. When the ambulance arrived, Dr. Lauren McCaslin and the ER team were ready and standing by.
Cliff was having what’s commonly called a “widowmaker” heart attack. Heart attacks occur when blood clots form around plaque that builds up on the walls of the arteries in the heart. The term “widowmaker” is used when the left anterior descending artery, which supplies blood to the largest part of the heart, is totally or mostly blocked. The heart muscle can suffer extensive damage if blood flow is not rapidly restored. And if not treated quickly, these heart attacks are often fatal.
Cliff was rushed from the ER to the cardiac cath lab, part of Washington Regional’s Walker Heart Institute, where Dr. Joel Carver and his team discovered two of Cliff’s arteries were almost completely blocked. They inserted a small catheter into a blood vessel and threaded it through the blood vessel to his heart, where they placed stents to reopen Cliff’s arteries and restore blood flow.
When Cliff woke up after the procedure, he had just one thing on his mind. “The first thing I asked Dr. Carver was, ‘Did my team win?’ Then, Dr. Carver and the nurse explained to me what they did,” Cliff recalls.
A few days later, Cliff was able to go home, and he continues to recover thanks to Washington Regional’s cardiac rehabilitation program. Cardiac rehabilitation is an important step that helps people get back to their regular routine after they’ve had a heart attack. A team of physicians, cardiac rehabilitation nurses, dietitians and other health care professionals work together to help patients return to an active lifestyle. Cliff says cardiac rehab has given him tools and knowledge that he’ll continue to use. “I definitely recommend rehab and the classes with the dietitian; they can benefit everybody,” he says.
A couple weeks after leaving the hospital, Cliff came back to thank those who helped save his life and presented members of his care team with signed baseballs and a jersey from his team. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the EMTs in the field and the team here at Washington Regional – the team in the ER, the cath lab and in the cardiology unit on the third floor,” he says.
Cliff now plans to volunteer with the American Heart Association and hopes others can learn from his experience. “Looking back, I think I had warning signs for a year,” he says. “My feet would swell and I had pain in my back between my shoulder blades, but I thought it was because I was out of shape,” he explains. Many people ignore early warning signs of a heart attack, something Cliff wants to change.
“Men like to think we’re tough, but we’re not. It took having a heart attack for me to realize it. My body was talking to me, but I ignored it. If I can reach another person and keep what happened to me from happening to them, I’m going to do it.”