I Could’ve Died!
It was the first day of the Charles Schwab Cup championship, at the Sonoma Valley Golf Club, and celebrity golfer Joey Sindelar felt a little short of breath. “I remembered saying to my caddie, ‘John, are these hills getting to you?’” The caddie said “No.” Sindelar thought maybe it had been all the flying he’s been doing recently, between a couple of tours in Texas then back home to Central New York State and on to Ohio and then to Sonoma. He wasn’t feeling pain, just light-headedness and difficulty breathing. “It felt like I was in Denver,” he says. He thought he would feel better, but he didn’t.
Two days later, through the rear window of an ambulance about to depart for Sonoma Valley Hospital, Sindelar watched his fellow players walking down the fairway in the beautiful Sonoma sunshine. “I remember thinking, Wow. Outside that window, for those people 200 yards away, life is very normal. But inside that ambulance,” he recalls, as the emergency crew labored over him, giving oxygen, taking his vital signs, “it was a whole new reality.”
He remembers, even as his life hung in the balance, being terribly disappointed to have had to leave the game behind. “Because I was playing well – and that’s what I do!”
Nevertheless, next thing he knew, Joey Sindelar was in the Sonoma Valley Hospital emergency room embarking on a diagnostic journey that seemed puzzling to all.
“I’ll never forget Dr. Cohen sitting down and saying, ‘We’ve got to keep looking.’”
“His history was compatible with certain possible diagnoses,” says Emergency Department Director Dr. Robert Cohen, “however his physical exam and the results of the studies did not support these diagnoses.” Dr. Cohen called in Dr. James Price, the cardio-pulmonary specialist, and the Emergency Room team proceeded with a technique known as “diagnosis by exclusion” wherein they performed a series of tests – the EKG, the lab studies, the chest X-ray, the additional lab studies and finally a CT angiogram of the chest – until they could find the problem. Time was of the essence. Sindelar remembers one particular moment with emotion. It was after he’d had the CAT scan and Drs. Cohen and Price were looking at the film. He says the relief on their faces told him everything. “You could tell they’d finally found it, and they were really, really happy about it.”
“The sequence,” explains Dr. Cohen, “led to the diagnosis of pulmonary embolus.” A blood clot? In someone fit as Sindelar? Dr. Price explains. “What happens is, if we go on a cross country trip, or we sit for long period of times, as Joey Sindelar had, the blood in the veins stagnates because we’re not up and moving around, and as a result can form clots. And the clots can propagate and get larger. And those can break off and go to your lung. A lot of people die of those things,” he says. “Sindelar could have died on the course.”
Sindelar describes another important aspect of the treatment he received. “They gave me, right from the start, just the perfect amount of knowledge I needed, and comfort. It felt like home.” When he was discharged and ready to go home and his wife walked with him out the door, Sindelar did not want to leave right away. “I can remember being incredibly emotional when we left the hospital,” he says. “We got out late in the day, and it was getting dark, and I just needed to look around the hospital and to drive around the Plaza. And I remember saying to my wife, Sue, I almost died here!”