TESTIMONY OF A
HEART ATTACK
SURVIVOR
by
Jason Sifflet
Kevin Farmer was an active teenager, an athlete, a cadet with enough consciousness to watch what he ate. He was always a big boy, in danger of being overweight, but as he grew up, he exercised and took care of himself. But everybody lapses some times. And even if he didn’t, diet and exercise were not the only factors affecting his health. Lurking deep in his DNA were pieces of code that made him and others like him more likely to die of heart disease no matter what they did. One day, his fate came knocking and Kevin was introduced to the most fatal form of cardiac event known to man. This is the story of how he survived it.
“Truthfully, it was a surprise. The way it presented was a case of an intense tightness in the chest. After a couple of hours and it wasn’t going away I realised this is not indigestion or heartburn. This is something else. This happened to me one day at work in July 2014,” revealed Kevin, who recently become President of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and current Deputy Director of the Barbados Museum. At that time I think I might have been about 225 pounds. I wish I was six feet tall, but I’m about 5’5”. I was tough and biggish or big and toughish, whichever way you want to put it. In a meeting at work I felt these three really tight constrictions around my chest and I realised something was wrong,” he said, relaying how he found out just what was happening to him after he went immediately to his doctor.
“She gave me an EKG right there in her office. And her first question after that test was, ’So how did you get here?’ And I said, ‘I drove.’ And she said, ‘OK, well, you’re not doing that anymore. You’re having a heart attack. We’re going to take you to QEH.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And she said, ‘Yes. This is what is happening to you right now.’ “At the hospital we got the confirmation: I was having a cardiac event. Then came the realisation that I will have to deal with this. How am I going to survive this? How do I deal with it? How do I not freak out? I didn’t freak out. I guess I didn’t fully believe it. Of course, I was scared. I was staring death in the face. But having to call people and tell them, I couldn’t break down in tears. That wouldn’t make sense. I was scared and worried and concerned. But I was trying to be as calm as possible. In hindsight, having faith helped,” Kevin declared.
He finally discovered one of his arteries was 90% blocked.
“It was my left anterior descending artery. It’s called the widow maker. It’s the one that doesn’t give you any warning. It just happens. Given the severity of the blockage, I was told that surgery was the only option,” he said, acknowledging that his family history and diabetes put him at risk.
Kevin shared his post-operation experience of excruciating pain, having a machine help him to breathe to prevent collapse of his lungs, taking medication several times daily, and working with a therapist to walk.
“I spent about a week in ICU and by the time I went back to the ward, I could walk around by myself. But then, I had to go back to surgery. I had a post-op infection. They opened me up again, took out all of the hardware and replaced it. Then I had to take a serious dose of antibiotics for a while and start my recovery all over again.
“It was a relief when they told me it was okay to leave the hospital. But recovery took a while. You’re really weak. You’re not supposed to lift anything heavier than a cup of tea. My wife helped me with my recovery. In all I was home for about six months,” he recalled.
His referral to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Barbados for rehabilitation, and the care he got made him understand the importance of the work they did.
“It made me realise that physical exertion after a heart attack is necessary. It made me realise that you need to take care of this thing that you always took for granted and you need to exercise it. The people I met who went through what I went through helped me see that there is life after that. I got back into the gym and started riding and eating better.
“This is something you have to be consistent about. You can’t beat yourself up if you miss a day, or eat something bad, but you have to be consistent and it makes you appreciate life. And then there are the small things you take for granted, like being able to walk five steps without feeling horrible. If you are lucky enough to be given a second chance, part of what you have to do with your life is help others. It doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to be something you tell people about, but you have to do something,” he shared.
His experience also served to heighten his understanding that in the Caribbean, dealing with the prevalence of chronic diseases, constantly raising awareness must be a priority.
“We blame cultural factors, but it goes beyond the cultural. Look at the work the foundation is doing with childhood obesity and regarding prevention, you have to look at all factors beyond the cultural. Look at how we source our food: why is it more expensive to buy healthy food than to buy junk food? I know the growing topic is around food security. We need to have enough land to grow our food. But we also have to look at food insecurity. Why is it that access to healthy food is so much more expensive and not as easily accessible by the majority of our population?” Kevin queried.
When we say it’s cultural, it makes it easy to say, ‘Yeah, it’s all the things we eat.’ But if all the things we serve are fried, because it’s cheaper, then what are we saying? There are other issues at play here. We need to take a serious look at this. Part of the prevention is exercise, healthier food choices, making sure that healthier foods are more accessible. And that means looking at how we price our food. Who makes the decision that the healthy thing costs twice as much as the unhealthy thing? Does it mean taxing the unhealthier thing to offset the cost of access to healthier food? We might have to have programmes to teach people how to cook healthier food,” he opined.
“Where in our lives do we prioritise healthiness? We talk about work-life balance, but we need to have health balance. I think that’s the kind of conversation Barbadians need to have. It’s the type of thing the foundation has been involved in for the past 35 years and continues to be involved in, particularly on the prevention side now with the childhood obesity programme. But food insecurity is something we need to talk about on the prevention side,” he observed.
