Editor’s note: Four years ago, EMS Chaplain Russell Myers, D.Min. found himself in the back of the ambulance, not counseling medics, but as a patient. Read his account of his medical emergency and plea to EMS providers, “Don’t die from embarrassment.”
August 9, 2021, was the day I didn’t die.
Three times that day I felt the pressure in my chest, pushing in from front and back.
The first two times I dismissed it, the third time, I knew.
Something isn’t right, I said.
Should I drive you to the hospital, my wife asked.
No, I said. I work for an ambulance company.
People die in the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital.
We need to call 911.
I learned later that my LAD, left anterior descending artery, was 99% blocked.
The widow maker, the paramedics call it.
Now four years later, I think about how different life would have been for my family if I had died that day.
My grandson was 9 then; now he is 13.
We’ve made a lot of memories in those four years.
My step grandsons are here now, too.
We all were on vacation together last week.
They would have known me only through stories.
I lived to retire from the ambulance company.
Would my wife have been able to keep the cabin, the house?
Fortunately, we’ll never know, because I didn’t die that day.
