A Winnipeg doctor and former member of Parliament says he’s grateful to an off-duty firefighter who likely saved his life after he suffered a sudden heart attack while jogging in Vancouver.
Dr. Doug Eyolfson, an emergency physician, was training for a marathon on the Seawall in Vancouver’s Stanley Park on Monday when he suddenly collapsed.
“I remember getting to the other side of the park and … the next thing you know I was in the hospital,” Eyolfson, who was attending a conference in Vancouver, said in an interview on Wednesday’s Up to Speed CBC Manitoba. a few hours before coronary bypass surgery.
Eyolfson says heart problems run in her family (her father had the same surgery 25 years ago), but she had no warning before her own heart attack.
“I’ve always been good at never ignoring the symptoms. I guess this happened out of the blue.”
The doctor, who was the Liberal MP for the Winnipeg constituency of Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley from 2015 to 2019, says he was told an off-duty firefighter who was also off-duty started CPR and called 911.
He waited about 20 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
“I got hit twice and that got me going, and then they took me to St. Paul’s Hospital,” Eyolfson said.
A runner and cyclists use the Vancouver Seawall in a 2020 file photo. Dr. Doug Eyolfson was running in the area Monday when he suffered a heart attack. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
He now knows he had an 80 percent blockage in his left coronary artery, a type of blockage doctors sometimes refer to as “the widow,” so he believes the efforts of the firefighter and paramedics who responded likely they saved his life.
Without it, “I would be known as ‘the dearly departed,'” he said.
“I had no pulse. If he hadn’t been there and started hitting me and he hadn’t surprised me, then yes, I would have died.”
Now, “it’s like the quote from the old movie: ‘I’m glad to be alive,'” Eyolfson said.
He still hasn’t spoken to the firefighter who saved his life, but Eyolfson wants to thank him for what he did.
“After this is over, I want to talk to him. I definitely owe him a bottle of whiskey.”