CHARDON, Ohio — Andrew Gruber will tell you he likes to stay in shape.
“I ref football and ump baseball in high school,” he said. “So I try to stay pretty active.”
He’s also a runner. So when his physical was canceled in early April he said he didn’t think too much about it. Until he started feeling sick a few days later.
On April 16, he “was having a little bit - I thought it was maybe just indigestion or something back then.”
But he soon found out it wasn’t indigestion.
"And all of a sudden I just felt it getting worse, so as soon as it started to get worse, I hurried up and called 911,” he said. “And within five minutes they were at my doorstep."
Gruber was having a heart attack.
“When we got on scene, he was definitely in distress,” said Michael Bennett. “He was laying on the couch complaining of nine and 10 chest pain.”
Bennett is a firefighter and paramedic with the Munson Fire Department.
"Technically, textbook call,” Bennett said. “Everything went just like you would practice in the station, follow the protocol."
Bennett and the EMS team with him had to work fast.
"From the time they picked me up to the time I was on the operating table was only 20 minutes and they said that might have been a record for them, even, at the Munson Fire Station,” Gruber said.
But it meant going to the hospital during the pandemic.
"One of the scary things is you go by yourself though,” he said. “You can’t take any family member, you can’t even have any visitors. So even when I was in the hospital there was no visitors, you could only talk on the phone."
Dr. Gregory Stefano said Gruber’s condition was serious. He was suffering from a ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). One of Gruber’s arteries was completely blocked and blood was not getting through his heart.
"And when that’s happening, the artery is, or the heart muscle is getting injured and actively dying if there’s no blood flow restored,” Stefano, a cardiologist at Universty Hospitals, said. Because Gruber’s condition was worsening quickly, doctors and paramedics knew they didn’t have a lot of time.
"We know that the faster we get it open, it’s been shown time and time again that that is the best outcomes,” said Stefano.
All of the work needed to be done with the extra precautions put in place under the cloud of the pandemic.
"We have to wear masks and gloves and goggles and you know, gowns,” Bennett said. “And the hospital, they’re doing all that stuff and isolating their patients in rooms."
Now, Gruber is recovering and looking back at the life-saving work by doctors and EMS.
"Oh definitely, he told me probably another 20 minutes or a half hour, I could’ve died, too, so. I was lucky I called right away,” he said.
