How it all began

On November 27, 2015 I was simply walking along a street in the Arctic town of Inuvik in the early afternoon when I became very short of breath. I managed to walk home and slept for 1 1/2 hours until about 4:00 PM. I picked up my spouse Sandra who was walking home from work and reported the shortness of breath incident to her. As a result we went to the Inuvik hospital to the walk-in clinic shortly before 5:00 PM. I was taken to one of those little rooms to await the doctor. He finally came, took my blood pressure, asked me some questions about my shortness of breath, and then said - "You are not walking out of here, I am ordering a wheel chair." So that's life, I drive to the hospital for what I think is a routine checkup and am told: "you are not leaving." Good thing Sandra was there to drive the car home.

That evening I was given the preliminary diagnosis of heart attack, had some Xrays that didn't show anything and the decision was made to fly me south by medevac plane to Edmonton for treatment. 

The following day, Saturday the 28th, I left in the evening from Inuvik in a King Air and arrived at the Cardiac Unit in the Sturgeon Hospital at St Alberta just north of Edmonton at about midnight. I thought it was ironical that I have flown a King Air as copilot, but here I had to lie in the cargo bay on a stretcher! Sandra arrived the following day, Sunday the 29th on a scheduled Canadian North flight.

The neat thing is that it was discovered that I did not in fact have a heart attack. Yes, my heart was stressed, because it had trouble pushing all that blood around in my lungs, trying to get enough oxygen, that afternoon of Friday the 27th