All he knows about his first heart attack, in November 2003, is what his wife tells him: At 1 in the morning, wearing sweat-soaked pajamas, he complained about a pain in his arm. Steingraber vaguely recalls getting dressed and climbing into the car before his wife drove him to the hospital.
After a quadruple bypass surgery and a month of recovery, Steingraber resumed working part-time, transitioned into full-time and then went back to the habit of working up to 50 hours a week.
Just two years later, as he was scheduling insurance physicals with a nurse, a pain in his chest that had been growing all day, suddenly escalated.
"It felt like somebody put a hole right through my chest," Steingraber says.
Struggling to breathe, Steingraber took two nitroglycerine tablets he carried with him, but rarely needed, to slow down his heartbeat. But that didn't help.
Confused and afraid, he got behind the wheel of his car, something the American Heart Association strongly warns against unless you have no other choice. Then, Steingraber drove himself 18 miles to the same hospital his wife took him in 2003 -- even though there was one right across the street and another three miles away.
"I can't explain why, but I guess I was thinking that first hospital was the cure," he says.
As the pain became almost unbearable, Steingraber worried as he drove, clutching his chest: "Am I going to live to make it there?"
Inexplicably passing right by the emergency room entrance, Steingraber parked his car in a lot behind the hospital.
"I just staggered in and pulled out my wallet and told the gal, 'Please call my wife,'" Steingraber remembers saying. "I think I'm dying of a heart attack."
But he lived to tell the story. After his doctor determined this heart attack was caused by the collapse of one of his bypass vessels, he inserted a stent to solve the problem. Now working three to four days a week, Steingraber feels good again but realizes he's living with a damaged heart.
"You can't sit there and dwell on it, it will eat you up," he says. "I just enjoy today."
Read how to survive a heart attack.
Sources:
"Heart Attack Symptoms and Warnings." americanheart.org. 2008. American Heart Association. 15 Oct. 2008 <http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4595>.
Steingraber, Doug. Telephone interview. 6 Oct. 2008.
