‘His story was my story,’ Canadian Dr. Chris Loreto said upon realizing that the symptoms and prescribed medications matched
Dr. Chris Loreto, an emergency room physician at the Timmins and District Hospital in Timmins, Ont., had an “aha” moment while helping a man who was suffering from a massive heart attack. It turned out the doctor had the same condition as the patient.
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“There’s a reason why it’s the number one killer in the world,” Loreto said in an interview with the National Post. “Because it’s still out there.”
The Post reached Loreto at home in Timmins, “waiting for my next appointment” as he continues his recovery. “It’s been a longer journey than I expected. But I didn’t need a bypass, so I guess that’s good.”
Loreto said he should have known something was wrong. He had been experiencing chest pain and other symptoms for several months while running. It got so bad he would sometimes scream to get through the pain.
He had reached out to his own family doctor, suggesting he had acid reflux, but the prescribed medication, Nexium, wasn’t helping. Part of the problem was that Loreto hadn’t mentioned that his symptoms came on during exercise.
“Had I been honest with (my doctor) I would have been admitted to hospital or done tests and he would not have prescribed Nexium,” he said. “Which is probably why I didn’t tell him.”
Things got worse on Nov. 12. Loreto was playing hockey, and his symptoms were coming on strong. “I remember struggling that night. I said, ‘I’m sucking wind tonight.’”
Still, he played through the pain and then went home to bed. The next morning, he was in the emergency room helping a patient who had gone into cardiac arrest from a heart attack. That man’s wife mentioned that he was on Nexium for acid reflux, but that it wasn’t helping.
“His story was my story,” Loreto recalled.
But even then he wasn’t convinced. Colleagues coerced him — reluctantly — into letting them do bloodwork and an EKG, which records electrical signals in the heart and can help diagnose heart attacks and irregular heartbeats.
That finally did it. “I was having a heart attack on the same day, the same time as the guy I was taking care of.”
A phone call to a cardiologist at Health Sciences North in Sudbury created some brief confusion on the line, since Loreto had just called about the patient he was treating, and was now calling back about himself.
“I was transferred the next day,” he said. He ended up in a room across the hall from his patient, and the man’s wife visited them both.
“She said: ‘Thank you for saving my husband’s life,’” he recalled. “I said: ‘No, thank you for saving my life.’”
Looking back, Loreto said he was clearly in denial about his health problems.
“Had I had me in front of me, I would have said to him, as my colleagues said to me: ‘How long have you been stupid?’”
He said people have asked him how, as a physician, he was unable to see the problem.
“It’s because I’m a physician that I was able to rationalize it away,” he said. “You also know what else it could be, and you’re going to convince yourself it’s those things as opposed to what you really think it is. Because you don’t have the time for this now.”
He noted that his father had a heart attack at 59. Loreto is 60. “I beat him by a year,” he said, adding: “You don’t want to believe it’s true. You don’t want to believe that it’s happening.”
Loreto remains on medical leave and has started cardiac rehab after being transferred from Sudbury to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto for more procedures that involved adding stents to his arteries.
He’s happy with the care he’s received. “There’s amazing specialists in this province, and they do great work, but they’re busy.”
His advice to patients in a similar situation, whether they’re doctors or not: “Do what I say, and not what I do.” If symptoms are continuing, take them seriously.
Speaking of doctors (or maybe just himself) he added: “We’re wonderful at taking care of others and stink at taking care of ourselves.”
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