Planes, trains and heart surgery

Damn Canadians … comin’ over the border and stealing all our good health care. A co-worker’s parents were connecting through Minneapolis when his father suffered a heart attack. He was seated in the back of the plane before take-off, and they were able to quickly reach the defibrillator. Apparently if you have a heart attack at a major metropolitan airport, Minneapolis is the place to do it. They have some sort of top-notch trauma center with lots of machines that go “ping.” They induced a coma and cooled his body to hypothermic levels to reduce internal damage. That was on a Sunday earlier this month. One week later, he was back on a plane headed home. Similar story – my mother had open heart surgery to remove a benign tumor and flew from Boston to Denver two weeks later to visit her grandchildren.