What's new
Van's Air Force

Don't miss anything! Register now for full access to the definitive RV support community.

Heart Attack

Status
Not open for further replies.

Champ

Well Known Member
Had one yesterday so I’m killing time in the hospital waiting to hear about an angiogram etc,etc. Doing fine now. Did a “heart” search on VAF and got a bunch of good info. One good thing is there haven’t been new threads on this since 2010. Good health I hope!

I’m 71 & healthy til now but have a family history of heart issues. I have had chest & jaw pain episodes and was concerned about losing my medical. I recently aced a stress test and echo cardio gram. I’m told now that they are not all that conclusive.

I’ll be working on getting my medical back after this is over. Did it once before! I had depression issues some 20 hrs ago. One of the big things that got me thru that was a goal to finish the RV, get my medical back and fly again - RV therapy! That’s one reason it took 15 yrs to finish it.

In the mean time - Carry On!
 
Last edited:
pretty fast and good luck

We will all be cheering you on during the process to get a medical. Maybe a basic med. Just don't let your class three expire.... if possible.

As to building an RV in 15 hours.... I wouldn't be embarrassed.

Cheers, and best wishes.
 
I am sorry to hear about the attack but glad you are doing well. I would spend a few bucks and set up a phone consult with the guys I will post a link for. They are the absolute best at getting pilots back to work and used by 99% of the professional pilots in the US. They can provide advise on what the FAA will be looking for and what you want to avoid getting put into your medical record.

https://www.aviationmedicine.com/co...r-line-pilots-association-international-alpa/
 
In relation to heart condition and FAA medical, my blood pressure shot up after the 2nd shot of the mRNA vax. My AME is monitoring the situation now to make sure my class 3 isn't affected. You guys may want to check and verify before your medical renewal.
 
25 year ICU RN here and worked with many heart docs. Their sentiments regarding stress test weather they're treadmill or chemically induced are good
"indicators" of cardiac health. But..... until you lay on the table of truth and they get the films from a cardiac catheterization will you have the indisputable truth.

One very important thing I discovered from total of 32 years at the bedside is that a patients attitude is VERY important. As soon as the mind/will power give up the health of our bodies soon follows. Hand's down... seen it many times. Your attitude is spot on and I believe and hope this will be behind you in no time.

Good luck to you fellow aviatior.
 
Canada, not USA

Folks, be aware that Dennis the OP lives in Canada. I’m not sure if the Canadian medical rules differ from our rules but they may. Either way, I hope Dennis finds a path to keeping his flying privileges. As Paul pointed out, your attitude about your health is important.
Best wishes to you, Dennis.
 
I noticed that Dennis is in Canada, so this may not apply. 15 years ago my airplane partner (also named Dennis) had a heart attack (US class 3 med). He worked hard and did regain his medical. His main advice was to make sure your doctor knew exactly what the FAA (in your case Canadian authorities)wanted. He passed a stress test, but the FAA rejected it because the parameters had not been exactly the same as specified by the FAA Oklahoma City. He had to take another one to make them happy.
Good luck.
 
Navigating the FAA’s medical certification process requires the participation of possibly five different entities…the pilot/patient, the FAA medical branch, the AME, the patient’s doctor, and any specialists/consultants that are participating in the patient/pilot’s care. With 70,000 possible diagnosis codes to choose from, it is depressingly easy for even the smallest communication or documentation carelessness to put the entire certification process in jeopardy and for one or more of those players to send the process off into something that might require a LOT of inconvenience with the FAA and unnecessarily jeopardize the ability of the patient to fly an airplane legally. The older we get, the more possible these events become with each new medical event.

Be very, very careful about communication and how things get coded and documented in your chart, especially if you’ve had a recent change in your health status.
 
I’ll be getting into it but I expect Transport Canada regs are very similar to the FAAs. No point in reinventing the wheel.
 
heart attack

Glad that you are doing well. When my dad had his, and the quad by-pass that followed, it took him about 8 months to get his back He was 68 when this happened. The thing that helped him was that he kept a detailed record of every dr. visit, correspondence, mail, and phone call. He also had a good atty. to help sort out all of the legal stuff. Cost him about $5,000.00 in the end, but to him it was worth it.

Good luck!
 
I’ll be getting into it but I expect Transport Canada regs are very similar to the FAAs. No point in reinventing the wheel.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I would hope that Transport Canada is more reasonable and less bureaucratic. I think that the FAA medical branch is … uh…. ”overly enthusiastic” in its regulatory interpretation (Doug would have to delete this post if I expressed myself more accurately).

IMHO, in dealing with them, be circumspect, communicate clearly with your doctors and with your AME, and be very VERY informed. Don’t go into your medical certification with the idea the the FAA is your friend and sincerely wants to help you get back in the air.
 
I am sorry to hear about the attack but glad you are doing well. I would spend a few bucks and set up a phone consult with the guys I will post a link for. They are the absolute best at getting pilots back to work and used by 99% of the professional pilots in the US. They can provide advise on what the FAA will be looking for and what you want to avoid getting put into your medical record.

https://www.aviationmedicine.com/co...r-line-pilots-association-international-alpa/

I used AMAS about 7 years ago, when I had an SVT event (supraventricular tachycardia). I had ablation surgery, which basically cures you of the problem, but medical re-certification is required. AMAS walked this through the process and got me my first class medical back in 6 months - which is the minimum required. I highly recommend them if you want your medical back.
 
Medical

I have had some similar issues I would like to talk to you if you can give me some of your wisdom you have gained please call me so I can get medical back on track my number is 816-two six zero 58 eight 4. Thanks Al marsh.
 
Al - I will give you a call when I’m home from the hospital and settled.

PS - I see your from Grain Valley. I had some aerobatic/emergency recovery training there with John Morrissey in his Pitts S2a this past November - Great experience. Hope to get back there in the spring as we have kids/grandkids in KC.
 
Basic Med is not a ire to path after a Heart Episode

Can’t go to Basic if your FAA Medical has “been denied, suspended, or revoked”. A heart attack or any type of heart surgery (may include a cath) constitutes a suspension - remember, we’re supposed to self police.

In the U.S., you’ll need to go back thru Oklahoma City for a Special Issuance before proceeding to Basic. This will typically involve a full work up (including min. 9 minutes on a Bruce Stress Test), full notes and a report/letter from your cardiologist. The last item is important and the entire package can get bounced back if he just sends test results and a cursory report (personal experience).

Once you’re on Basic Med, any additional cardiac episodes will require another Special Issuance from the FAA before you can again apply for Basic in order to exercise flight privileges.

Terry, CFI
RV9A N323TP
 
Can’t go to Basic if your FAA Medical has “been denied, suspended, or revoked”. A heart attack or any type of heart surgery (may include a cath) constitutes a suspension - remember, we’re supposed to self police.

In the U.S., you’ll need to go back thru Oklahoma City for a Special Issuance before proceeding to Basic. This will typically involve a full work up (including min. 9 minutes on a Bruce Stress Test), full notes and a report/letter from your cardiologist. The last item is important and the entire package can get bounced back if he just sends test results and a cursory report (personal experience).

Once you’re on Basic Med, any additional cardiac episodes will require another Special Issuance from the FAA before you can again apply for Basic in order to exercise flight privileges.

Terry, CFI
RV9A N323TP

Having a heart attack is not the same as having your medical certificate suspended. True, you must not fly according to the regs, but that is not an FAA suspension and the basic med rules are clear that only actions taken by the FAA (suspension, denial, etc.) prohibit the use of basic med. It would seem that you can go to basic med now. The situation is a bit grey here. While on basic med, if you have a H/A, you must get a one time SI. However, the rules dont discuss what happens if you get the H/A during a valid class III and then go to basic med. Might be worth having an expert guide you through this to see if a loophole exists, though I suspect that regs require an SI before returning to flight. The big benefit of basic med is that the SI is one time only and need not be repeated every year. Under class III, the SI is only good for a year.

Larry
 
Last edited:
Speaking from experience, in Canada you are eligible to hold a medical 6 months after the “event”. You will need an echocardiogram and a stress test and the help of your came. Test results may not be from prior to 5 months after the attack. Have your doctor schedule your tests needed as soon after 5 months after attack as possible. Have your came do a medical and electronically send in reports between 5 and 6 month after the event. If all is well 6 months after the attack you can be flying. I was 6 months and 3 days.

Jack
 
Thanks everyone. It’s surprising how many pilots have gone thru similar episodes. There are even a few local to me. I’ve got a good CAME who has helped with TC before and a son who would gladly put more time on the RV to keep it healthy. Bypass surgery coming up and should get me healthy again to.
 
champ, we are hoping you make a full recovery. most are not concerned about our health till something like this happens. food for thought-search calcium score. not well known by many people. a great indicator of ones health. you are more than welcome to message me thru =VAF= and I can
help you with more info if you are interested. good luck.
IMG-0735.jpg
 
I'm 74 and just got an FAA Special Issuance after my 2nd H.A. and stent. Now on Basic Med. I took statins for 11 years after my first H.A. but it didn't stop the 2nd one. Statins did not prevent my brother from dying at age 50. He had a bypass, exercised, lost weight, and died leaving the gym of a 2nd H.A. If you are on statins, get off them. Lipitor touts a 2-deaths-per-100 vs a 3-deaths-per 100 as a 33% improvement. In fact it is only a 1% absolute improvement. There is plenty of modern evidence that statins harm you. They contribute to higher mortality in the elderly and increased risk of diabetes and dementia.

LDL is not the problem; it is poor control of insulin arising out of a high carb, high sugar diet that leads to insulin resistance. I recommend watching Dr. Paul Mason's videos at the youtube channel "Low Carb Down Under". Dr. Nadir Ali is also very credible. Dr Robert Lustig will scare you straight about sugar. Yeah, I am a bit of a camp-meeting evangelist about this but I meet so many who have no idea. Their docs say "you lowered your LDL, great!" A friend from my Air Force days, had bypasses, went on statins, lowered his LDL, now he is a full-blown diabetic and his doc wants to put him on a more powerful statin.

I will go now, nurse. :)
 
I would recommend against relying on any medical advice found on the internet and instead go with the advice of your own cardiologist.
 
Kent is correct about statins

Statins have an NNT of 100. That means you have to treat 100 patents with a statin to prevent one myocardial event. That's a lot of side effects and costs - only a Pharma could love those numbers. For antibiotics to treat infections, the Number Needed to Treat is about 1.1

For certain treatments and preventives very popular in the past two years, the NNT has been "boosted" to near infinity.

...Kent is correct about sugar, too. ;)
 
IMHO, there are three areas not to get advice from the intertubes:

Legal advice
Taxes
Medicine

For those, I go to actual experts in the field...lawyers, accountants, and doctors.

Aviation (flying or building) sometimes runs a close fourth, but at least on here, there's more good than bad "advice" about airplanes. :)
 
IMHO, there are three areas not to get advice from the intertubes:

Legal advice
Taxes
Medicine

...
While your advice came from the Internet, I think there are millions (perhaps billions) of people that should heed it! Not to say everything you read is wrong, it's just hard to know which is right for you.

That said, sugar is poison, and the less you eat the better.
 
Last edited:
Easy to say "don't listen to the internet" but there are 20,000+ people here taking aviation advice from the internet. JohnDeakin (https://www.avweb.com/features_old/pelicans-perch-18mixture-magic/) retrained an entire generation of pilots on the wisdom of lean-of-peak operation via the internet. If you sample what I suggested and reject it, or choose to run it by your cardiologist, fine, but to refuse to expose yourself to information simply because it comes from the internet, well, . . .. The studies and evidence are cited here. To me it rings true. https://youtu.be/KRmAEx5CWIM
 
While medical self-care via the internet does have some benefits for the doctor-patient relationship, most physicians will tell you that it occasionally or often imposes some inefficiencies as many office visits are associated with some amount of explanation as to why the patient’s internet research is either not applicable to their specific medical condition, just plain wrong, or complete nonsense.

Certainly it’s always a great idea to be educated about one’s health, but without any medical education to sort out valuable internet information from some of the utter **** that’s out there, it’s wise to not take Dr. Google too seriously.
 
Last edited:
While your advice came from the Internet, I think there are millions (perhaps billions) of people that should heed it! Not to say everything you read is wrong, it's just hard to know which is right for you.

That said, sugar is poison, and the less you eat the better.

...And every hotdog you eat removes 1 day from your life. It must be true cuz I read it on the Internet!

-Marc
 
Statins have an NNT of 100. That means you have to treat 100 patents with a statin to prevent one myocardial event. That's a lot of side effects and costs - only a Pharma could love those numbers. For antibiotics to treat infections, the Number Needed to Treat is about 1.1

For certain treatments and preventives very popular in the past two years, the NNT has been "boosted" to near infinity.

...Kent is correct about sugar, too. ;)

My concern has been tweaked by Kent’s post, because I am on a statin, and have been for several years - and therefore have had my ear to the ground concerning my health. I try to keep abreast of what my limitations might mean related to my flying. I worked for GE Aviation for a while in Flight Ops Support, and worked with engineers every day (I’m a retired airline pilot, so I don’t speak the same language). The people I worked with spoke in acronyms. So your post also adds to my research, and therefore my confusion. WT…. does NNT mean? It sounds like something that should be added to my research data base, but only if I know what you are talking about.
I’d like to be able to fly my “new, almost finished RV6 until I’m at least 85 (I’ll be 69 next month), but prevention, health wise, is important at this stage. And I realize that seeking information here on this forum is ‘getting your information from the internet’ as warned about here, so I take it with a grain of salt that fuels further research. So please tell me what NNT stands for.
 
the Number Needed to Treat.

…in order to see a positive benefit. e.g., NNT of 100 for statins means you only see a benefit for 1 out of 100. NNT of 1.1 for antibiotics means for 11 patients it works 10 times.
 
Last edited:
…in order to see a positive benefit. e.g., NNT of 100 for statins means you only see a benefit for 1 out of 100.

What do you want to bet that if you are that "1" in 100 you wouldn't care what the ratio is. Just a thought on numbers and percentages.

-Marc
 
While your advice came from the Internet, I think there are millions (perhaps billions) of people that should heed it! Not to say everything you read is wrong, it's just hard to know which is right for you.

That said, sugar is poison, and the less you eat the better.


the real killer is High-fructose corn syrup...... brought to you by??? You look it up. It's the same people that brought you the cholesterol index by using only one study that was never confirmed. $tatin$ reduce the number, but do nothing to solve the problem. If you are on $tatin$, DO YOUR RESEARCH. I speak from a history of three family members on $tatan$, two died of Parkinson's, one with Dementia..... all under doctor care for high cholesterol numbers.

Trust your doctor but verify! Did you get the Covid and booster shots??

If you have an interest in improving your health, consider reading this book....food.PNG
and then learn about cholesterol, sugar, and High-fructose corn syrup.
 
"Here we go..."

It's worse than that: he mentioned clot shots.

I come here to fill in an office break between patients and see that others have answered the NNT question - and with 100% accuracy. See - you *can* trust medical answers on the internet - even from pilots :D

If you were that one out of a hundred, you would indeed be glad for the statin. If you were the 99 suffering deleterious side effects with no benefit, only harm, you'd feel different, I imagine.

Somewhere around here in my stacks of papers I have a study demonstrating 117 pediatric deaths will result for every life saved by administering mRNA to children. That's so bad an NNT cannot even be calculated for it. Those urging caution for their fellow pilots accepting medical advice without due diligence are spot-on, sadly.

I never thought I'd say this, but I am starting to look forward to retirement after 39 years of practice. More time to fly the RV and get the instrument ticket this year. I always thought I'd practice into my 70's, 80's, and even 90's a few days a week as long as my mental faculties were sharp, but my profession has become a national disgrace almost overnight.
 
It's worse than that: he mentioned clot shots.

I come here to fill in an office break between patients and see that others have answered the NNT question - and with 100% accuracy. See - you *can* trust medical answers on the internet - even from pilots :D

If you were that one out of a hundred, you would indeed be glad for the statin. If you were the 99 suffering deleterious side effects with no benefit, only harm, you'd feel different, I imagine.

Somewhere around here in my stacks of papers I have a study demonstrating 117 pediatric deaths will result for every life saved by administering mRNA to children. That's so bad an NNT cannot even be calculated for it. Those urging caution for their fellow pilots accepting medical advice without due diligence are spot-on, sadly.

I never thought I'd say this, but I am starting to look forward to retirement after 39 years of practice. More time to fly the RV and get the instrument ticket this year. I always thought I'd practice into my 70's, 80's, and even 90's a few days a week as long as my mental faculties were sharp, but my profession has become a national disgrace almost overnight.

This is now starting to spread vaccine misinformation, and the moderators should bring this thread to a close.

[Not passing judgment on vaccine info, but this thread is veering into the ditch......thread closed; S.Buchanan]
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top