Editor's Letter

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The Heart of the Matter

All the prosperity in the world won’t do you much good if your heart doesn’t work.

We recently had a close encounter with cardiac care in this region. Prosper Media’s general partner, Michael Ashker, wasn’t feeling well one afternoon. He had no searing pain, he just “didn’t feel right.”

This guy is not your typical candidate for heart disease. Early 50s, trim and fit, he runs, works out and eats very carefully. That night his girlfriend, Kathi, convinced him to go to the hospital to have it checked out. When he arrived at Sutter Roseville, they ran him through a battery of tests — EKG, blood tests — and pronounced there had been no heart attack. They wanted to keep him for observation, but he insisted on sleeping in his own bed.

The next morning he still felt poorly but came into the office. Meanwhile, Kathi called a friend at UC Davis who set up an appointment with the head of cardiology, Dr. Reginald Low.

Ashker drove himself to the hospital. Low examined him, listened to the symptoms, and immediately ordered an angiogram. An angiogram involves sending a dye into the heart via the femoral artery and monitoring the real-time fluid dynamics of the heart’s blood flow at each beat. The last thing he remembers is signing the consent forms and being wheeled into the operating room.

Ashker had a 90 percent blockage of the LAD (left artery descending) — called the “widowmaker” because of the often fatal consequences if it becomes blocked. Within minutes, Low and his team in the cath (for catheter) lab were inserting a relatively large 3.5-by-18 millimeter stent into his heart at the delicate intersection of two main arterial pipelines. Ashker awoke a couple hours later with a new lease on life … and perhaps a new outlook as well. You can hear and see Ashker’s own account online at prospermag.com. 

What do you do if someone is having a heart attack? The symptoms are often easy to miss, especially in women. Where should you go if you’re driving yourself or a loved one to a hospital? We tried to answer that by looking at the available statistics on hospital heart-attack care in our region. Of course, nothing with statistics is ever straightforward, so once we compiled our data we asked a local doctor to help us make sense of it. See our story “Code Blue” and the “Insider’s Guide to Cardiac Care” (pages 70-75) to learn what we discovered.

We hope you’ll never need to use it.

Jeffrey S. Young
Editor In Chief

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