Angel in the ER

An Angel in the ER

Williams, a long-haul trucker from Ogden, Utah had just delivered part of a half-load of frozen chickens in Colorado Springs on Dec. 11 when he began to feel a sudden tightness in his chest.

At first, he thought it was heartburn, or hunger, so he stopped for a snack at a truck stop. But within moments, the pain grew unbearable.

"I don't know how I drove that truck with that pain," says Williams, 48, who was driving northbound on I-25. "Then this hospital just showed up out of no place."

With his 12-year-old dog, Wiggles, in a frenzy sensing that something was wrong, and the pain growing excruciating, Williams spotted a sign for Sky Ridge Medical Center and quickly pulled off the highway, leaving his dog in the cab and his 70-foot semi-truck (loaded with 21 pallets of frozen chickens to deliver) still running.

By the time he staggered through the emergency room doors, he was in the throes of a heart attack, with one of his coronary arteries 100 percent blocked.

"He looked pretty bad," recalls Doug Sikes, a registered nurse in the Cardiac Cath Lab at Sky Ridge Medical Center. "He was pale and nauseous and in a lot of pain."

Before sedating Williams, Sikes assured him that his dog would be taken care of and his truck would be shut off.

"I was just putting myself in his shoes, thinking, ”If I was in a strange town with my dog and my truck, how would I feel about being intubated and going into the cath lab for a stent?" says Sikes.

Over the course of the next 11 days, he and others followed through well beyond Williams' expectations.

One nurse fetched the frightened dog from the cab of the truck while another figured out how to shut down the engine, while leaving the refrigerator unit still running. Others called Williams' boss, who sent someone to retrieve the truck and its frozen cargo. Kathy Sorge, a respiratory nurse, took Wiggles home at night, treating the finicky eater to steak, chicken and liver snacks, long walks and bringing him to Williams' bedside during the day.

While the situation was a trying one, and Williams is still recovering, things could have gone much worse, he says.

"The nurse that took care of my dog was an angel, an absolute angel," says Williams. "Wiggles had the time of his life."