Saturday, June 06, 2009

Rio Rancho Man Gives Thanks To Those Who Saved His Life

By Rosalie Rayburn
Journal Staff Writer
          Burgers are a favorite food Craig Kief plans to cross off his diet from now on.
        A persistent case of indigestion after a burger dinner recently sent the Rio Rancho resident to Presbyterian Urgent Care on High Resort, where life swiftly transformed into a drama worthy of the TV hit "ER."
        Turns out the indigestion was a sign that an artery supplying Kief's heart with blood was in serious trouble. So serious that staff summoned emergency services to take him to the cardiac unit at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, where specialists performed immediate surgery to unblock the artery and restore blood flow.
        Less than four hours after he first walked into Urgent Care with what he thought was just a bad bellyache, Kief was in the recovery room.
        Kief was so impressed by the skill and swift response of those involved in his care that he wrote an e-mail to the Journal to reassure other Rio Rancho residents that help is there when they most need it.
        "You can rest easily knowing all these caring experts are out there waiting for you to come through the door," Kief said in his e-mail.
        Rio Rancho Fire Rescue Paramedic Ryan Floersheim, who helped take Kief to the Albuquerque hospital, said Kief was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
        "If he didn't receive this care, his life would have been in serious jeopardy," Floersheim said.
        Kief said he had no idea he was about to have a heart attack. He went to the Urgent Care that Saturday morning in mid-May "for safety's sake." He was scheduled to fly out of town the next day and didn't want to be sick away from home.
        "I still didn't think it was a big deal," Kief said in an interview.
        At first, staff at Urgent Care didn't think so, either. Kief, 50, is a trimly built nonsmoker. But when he mentioned his father had died of a heart attack at 54, "everything changed," Kief said.
        Staffers put him in a wheelchair, inserted an oxygen tube in his nose and rushed him to the emergency department. There, staffers performed an electrocardiogram to measure his heart activity and took a chest X-ray. While waiting for the X-ray results, Kief said he felt a hot flash.
        "Then everything started to go real fast," Kief said.
        He remembers a man called Albert urging everyone to act quickly.
        "He kept saying, 'Time is muscle,' " Kief said.
        The man was Albert Vermette, a registered nurse in the Presbyterian emergency department in Rio Rancho.
        "In cases like this, minutes count," Vermette said. "When you cut off the pipeline that supplies it (the heart), the muscles get fatigued and stop working."
        Kief said he was given morphine for pain that was becoming increasingly severe. He was aware that a team from Rio Rancho Fire Rescue arrived to take him somewhere, but the next few hours were a blur.
        "I wouldn't recognize these winged angels if I was standing next to them in Albertsons," Kief said in his e-mail.
        Floersheim and fellow paramedic Jose Martinez III were on duty the morning of Kief's heart attack.
        Floersheim said paramedics undergo 18 months of rigorous training. In heart attack cases, they can administer medicines to relieve pain and open the arteries and pinpoint where injuries may be occurring.
        Kief said he was particularly impressed by the care the paramedics took to keep his wife informed of what treatments her husband would likely undergo.
        "She understood exactly what was being done to me and why," Kief said.
        He was home within a day, and within a couple of weeks, he was able to return part time to his job as a computer software engineer.
        From now on, doctor's orders include getting acquainted with a treadmill and cutting out the burgers.
        "My new diet includes a whole lot more green stuff," he said.
       

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