My Husband Made One Phone Call, and the Representatives Were Phenomenal

We were on a family trip with 17 family members (adult children, grandchildren and great grandchildren) to Grenada, West Indies to distribute my father’s ashes. My parents spent many years visiting Grenada. When my mother died in 2010, we took her ashes there. This trip was to “unite my parents” in the Caribbean Sea, in their favorite place.  

My husband and I arrived a week before the family to have some time together to visit with friends and to have some vacation time together before we had grandparent duty with our 4- and 7-year-old grandchildren.

We arrived on a Friday afternoon, jumped in the sea for a quick dip, went out to dinner and then to sleep. The next morning, we set out to make the walk to the grocery store. The walk entails some rather steep hills, but I work out regularly and had been on the stair master only a few days before departure. I have done this walk many times in past years. As we started up the first hill, only minutes into our walk, I began to feel quite ill. I sat down in the road, leaned against the side of a building and apparently promptly passed out.

When I came to, a passerby offered to call the hospital to get an ambulance. I was taken to the local, rustic, hospital and it was ultimately determined I had experienced a heart attack. This hospital had very limited resources for further testing or interventions and could not appropriately care for me. I contacted my doctor at home in Chicago, and in his words “You’ve got to get out of there”. 

Fortunately, we have been paying members of EA+ since 2009. My husband made one phone call, and the representatives were phenomenal working with him and the doctors to get me transferred all the way to our major hospital in Chicago to be treated by my personal physicians and to get the lifesaving care I needed. I was airlifted from Grenada to Chicago in an air ambulance, attended by both a flight nurse and respiratory therapist. It was door to door attendance by these skilled professionals.