December 8, 2011
On November 15, 2011, my wife and I were seated aboard a Continental Airlines flight at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, waiting to take off for Houston, Seattle, and Walla Walla. It was to be a short trip to Northeast Oregon for the first public reading of my just-published memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior’s Story.
Our trip was suddenly shortened. I lost consciousness, just sitting there. When I came to, flight attendants and my wife, Patricia, were huddled around me. The flight attendants were urgently questioning Patricia and me: what was my name? what had happened to me? had I been sick recently? How did I feel right now?
Patricia explained to them, and to me, that she had been asleep in her seat, waiting for takeoff, when she was wakened by me, noisily gasping for breath in the seat beside her.
Paramedics came aboard, took my blood pressure, found it elevated, gave me a medication or two, then brought a wheelchair, helped Patricia collect our personal belongings, asked her for our personal data so they could retrieve our luggage from the belly of the aircraft, and wheeled me off the plane, Patricia walking behind.
They took me to a clinic at the airport, then by ambulance to a hospital. A lot of questions, blood tests, electrocardiograms, more questions.
We were there 2 days: more tests – especially more electrocardiograms – more questions. One young doctor there was especially notable for her throroughness, her knowledge, her obvious caring, and her efficiency without seeming impatient with my slow answers in Spanish. This doctor mentioned the possibility of my condition being “isquemia (Spanish), a word which I didn’t know in either Spanish or English.
Nov. 19, a couple of days after we arrived in Oregon, my friend Walter Smith forwarded to me an email of an artile titled “How Agent Orange Led to Ischemic Heart Disease in Veterans.” “Ischemic” would be the the English pronunciation of the adjective for “isquemia.”
BINGO.
The article Walter had sent me was a wake-up call, but was very brief, and sent from a website I didn’t recognize. After we got home and I had two more attacks and more treatments, my wife got on the internet and found an informative article on “isquemia” in Spanish, which she urged me to read immediately. When I got to the end, it turned out to be a pretty informative piece from the New York Times, translated into Spanish. The original English is here:
file:///Users/deanmetcalf/Desktop/Desktop/Agent%20Orange%20-%20NYTimes.com.webarchive
Some more treatments, some more medications, an appointment scheduled with a cardiologist in Bogotá, and now I’m home, working some but mostly resting. First priority is to finish this note and send it to friends – especially veterans – so you’ll know why I’ve been so absent these past few days, and especially so that vets will know about ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE CAUSED BY (APPARENTLY) TRACE AMOUNTS OF AGENT ORANGE INGESTED 40 YEARS AGO.
In my case, this explains a few things previously unexplained.
But for now, this is long enough to be AN ALERT TO VETERANS: WATCH YOUR BODY. IT MAY CONTAIN INFORMATION YOU DON’T YET KNOW ABOUT, REGARDING THINGS WHICH MAY VISIT YOU LATER, AS YOU GET OLDER.
For decades, I was a serious athlete (ultramarathons, martial arts) and continuously active construction worker. But there were strange, infrequent episodes of unexplained weakness, to the point of not being able to walk. I once had to turn myself into an emergency room in Santa Cruz, California. I had to walk there, and though it wasn’t very far, I had to sit down several times on the sidewalk in order to regain enough strength to continue.
There were others, isolated, unexplained by doctors.
“The most common of the three illnesses, ischemic heart disease, restricts blood flow to the heart, causing irregular heartbeats and deterioration of the heart muscle–from the New York Times article noted above, which was published Oct. 12, 2009, and reported by James Dao.
The Veterans’ Administration recognized ischemic heart disease in October 2011 as being caused by toxins in Agent Orange, which was sprayed widely over Vietnam to kill foliage and deny the enemy cover; also to kill their rice crops. Vietnamese people are experiencing 4th generation birth defects from Agent Orange.
You don’t want to see the pictures of these children.
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