Area man, young boy both have their lives altered by heart disease
One runs two restaurants, the other runs in puddles. At 52 and 3 years old, Gordon Miller and Jakob Addis are an odd pairing. What the two do have in common, they would rather not. Separated by five decades, heart disease nearly took both their lives.
Addis was 14 days old when he had his first of three surgeries to make his faulty heart operate enough to save his life. Last June, Miller was barely resuscitated after a heart attack in a hospital emergency room.
Heart disease is the number-one cause of death for Americans, taking the lives of more people than the following seven causes combined.
For these two local families, heart disease is all too real. Next weekend, they will have a chance to share their stories.
The American Heart Association’s Heart Walk at Mount St. Macrina in Uniontown will bring them together Saturday to raise awareness of heart disease. At the event, an estimated 1,000 people and 90 businesses will raise $125,000 for heart disease, according to Melanie Boyd, corporate events director at the agency’s Fayette County Division.
“This is something that can affect all ages. You don’t have to be in your 80s and 90s to suffer from heart disease,” Boyd said. “It affects people of all races, genders and ages, and people don’t realize it.”
For this reason, Miller’s and Addis’ experiences stand out, because they are not what typically come to mind with heart disease. The Miller and Addis families seem like odd choices to be this year’s “spokes-families” for the Heart Walk.
But that’s the point.
None of it added up
It didn’t make sense. Miller had just lost 100 pounds. At 51, he was in the best shape of his life. He had a family history of heart disease, but, based on relatives’ experiences, he had another 10 years before any problems surfaced. More importantly, he had just passed a stress test with EKGs that showed no indication of heart disease. But here he was, sitting in Frick Hospital’s emergency room having a full-blown heart attack.
It was Friday, the end of a week-long project to build an addition on the deck of his Connellsville home. He woke up that morning and, as his feet hit the bedroom carpet, he felt pain moving up his arm. It was severe chest pain.
He had had symptoms before, but they were nothing. In June, he had been riding his bicycle and felt numbness in his arms radiating into his chest. The doctors said it was probably carpal tunnel syndrome from the strain of riding the bike. After all, he had just passed that stress test. It just did not add up.
But there he was, hooked up to an EKG in the emergency room, receiving treatment for the heart attack the machines still said he wasn’t having. The EKG still showed no signs of a problem; it matched the one taken earlier. The doctor looked at Miller’s wife.
“I don’t think he’s having a heart attack,” the doctor said. Just then, Miller fell back into the bed in cardiac arrest. The doctors grabbed the defibrillators.
“I was in a full blown heart attack. I was out,” Miller said. “If I wasn’t resuscitated, I was dead.”
The doctors shocked him twice. Nothing. On the third time, defibrillator shock brought him back. He had nearly died. If he hadn’t gone to the emergency room because of the pain in his chest, he would have.
“The doctors told me that if I had had to wait 10 to 15 minutes for an ambulance, I was done,” he said. “If I had tried to wait out the pain and not gone to the emergency room, I would be dead right now.”
Like that, he was gone
Jamie Addis had just moved to her room at the hospital after giving birth to her third son, Jakob. Her husband, James, had commented on how she could see the helicopter pad from the window in her room. It was a nice view, he said.
Days later, not knowing if she would ever see Jakob alive again, Jamie would watch a helicopter bearing her newborn son take off from that same pad.
Jakob had just been born on Sunday. His father was coming in the morning to take him home to meet his older brothers, J.J. and Jaryn. The first days of a baby’s life are supposed to be memorable, but not like this.
Jakob had suddenly stopped breathing. Jakob was supposed to be going home from the hospital in a few hours, not on his way to another hospital with a deadly heart problem.
“They woke me up and said, ‘There’s something wrong with your baby.’ I was panicking. This couldn’t be happening,” Jamie Addis said.
She called her husband.
“Even before the phone rang,” James said, “I knew something was wrong.”
The doctors had told her not to, but Jamie went down the sterile hallway to where she knew her baby would be. He was the only child in the nursery.
“All I could see were doctors and nurses all around him,” she said. “It was scary. I knew it was bad.”
He was swollen and suffering from a complete organ shutdown. He was rushed by helicopter to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. A helpless mother watched him fly away. Like that, he was gone. All doctors could tell the Addises was that their son was having heart trouble.
At Children’s, doctors identified Jakob’s condition as hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS). The left side of Jakob’s heart was underdeveloped and could not pump oxygenated blood into the body. Without it, Jakob’s organs and tissue would not receive oxygen. Left untreated, it would be fatal.
To save Jakob’s life, doctors would have to perform the three-stage surgical procedure, a relatively new method of correcting HLHS. But Jakob was diagnosed later than most babies with HLHS, and his health prevented the doctors from proceeding. The critical first surgery, which doctors usually perform in the baby’s first 10 days of life, had to wait until Jakob was two weeks old.
Because of his health complications from the late detection, doctors gave Jakob only a 20 percent chance of surviving the first surgery. Even in normal cases, the survival rate is only 33 percent.
“The first was the worst,” Jamie said. “They told us that right up front.”
Two years, countless hospital visits and another surgery later, Jakob is over the worst.
Another chance
Miller and Jakob Addis are connected by heart disease, but both are living healthy lives now.
Miller, a year from his near-fatal heart attack, is keeping fit and busy running the Italian Oven restaurants in Connellsville and Uniontown and the catering service he owns. Even more, the heart attack that nearly took his life actually saved his sister’s. After his close call, she had herself checked. Doctors found an 80 percent blockage in her heart; the early diagnosis prevented a catastrophic problem.
“If people were more cognizant of the warning signs – what they mean and not be afraid to bother the doctor – they’d be able to stave off a heart attack,” Miller said. He missed the warning signs, but said he is determined to see that no one else does.
Jakob, three years from his first surgery, is doing well. He is scheduled for the third and final surgery of the procedure soon.
He does not share the stamina of his older brothers, and his repaired heart may not last as long as his younger sister’s, but Jakob, a bashful boy who hides his smile behind a nervous hand, is a remarkable testament to living past heart disease.
“If you didn’t know he had a scar on his chest, you wouldn’t think anything was wrong,” James said.
Heart disease might have shaped their lives, but it has not conquered them.
At the Heart Walk next weekend, Miller and the Addis family hope to share that message.