From motorway to quadruple by-pass

01/02/2007

By Roy Clark

I suppose there isn’t really an ideal place to have a heart attack. A convenient place? Well yes, in a hospital I suppose. But, wherever it happens, it can be quite traumatic for relatives, especially one’s wife. For the patient? Well, particularly in my case, I felt oddly detached and I simply laid back and hoped for the best.

My heart attack happened at a most inconvenient time and in a most inconvenient place. I was in a tent halfway up a hillside in a fairly remote region of the Pyrenees in the south of France. It was around 4am in the morning.

The day before, my wife and I had driven for eight hours down the motorway from Dieppe. That, plus the drive down to Newhaven, then erecting our tent on the hillside campsite left us feeling quite tired. We had a meal in the restaurant at the bottom of the hill and climbed back up the steep pathway to our tent and a welcoming bed. On the way I felt what I imagined was a tinge of indigestion but thought nothing more of it.

We retired to bed. A couple of hours later the pain got a little worse. I got up, walked around and convinced myself that it was just heartburn. (Well, if you’ve never had a heart attack before how can you tell the difference?)

By that time my wife was fully awake and her feminine “sixth-sense” convinced her that this was something a little more serious. She dashed off down the hill to awake the owner of the campsite who, in turn, phoned the local doctor.

When I say “local” it was 35 kilometres away! Nevertheless, he arrived in record time and decided that this was indeed a heart attack and contacted the local hospital. Quite by chance, a fire service ambulance happened to be in the area and picked up the radio call ahead of the hospital ambulance. With some difficulty, they drove up the narrow track, carried me out on a stretcher into the ambulance and off we went.

As I lay in the back of the ambulance I remembered the many times, on previous visits to this camp site, we had driven along this winding, bumpy valley road. I visualised every twist and turn as I lay gripping the edge of the stretcher in case I rolled off! Halfway there, the ambulance from the hospital came to meet the fire ambulance. They decided not to transfer me, so the two ambulances, followed closely by my wife in our car proceeded in orderly procession to the hospital.

There, I went into intensive care for a couple of days and spent the rest of my holiday in a general ward where the closest I got to the French countryside was a window looking out over the town. I was flown back to England where, after several tests, angiograms and angioplasty I had a quadruple by-pass.

Now 10 years later, we still return every year to the same campsite - though in a cabin now, not a tent.