Sometimes, how we healthcare is what happens when your body spirals out of control and a team refuses to let you go.
Bobby Young found that out firsthand when he was cared for by the team at the Mississippi Heart and Vascular Institute at FMOL Health | St. Dominic.
He answers to a few different names. Around town, some folks call him “Sweet Old Bob.” But in the spring of last year, the name that mattered most was the one a nurse said out loud in the middle of a crisis: “Bobby Young, you are not dying on my watch.”
A Life Running at Full Speed
Bobby was a man in motion. He worked in the construction and lumber business, and when he decided to run for alderman in the small town of Richland, he threw himself into it the way he threw himself into everything.
He spent his days putting signs in the ground, knocking on doors and shaking hands. He was running for office and running a business at the same time, trying to keep pace with a to-do list that never seemed to end.
“I was speeding through life,” Bobby says.
That Thursday night, he told his wife he had one more sign to plant, but he wasn’t feeling right. He came home instead.
The Warning Signs
At 1:30 a.m. on Friday, Bobby woke up and couldn’t stop belching. His arms started tingling. Something felt deeply, undeniably wrong.
He woke his wife. In the car, he told her the truth: “Whatever is happening, it’s getting worse. Maybe pick up the pace.” A drive that should have taken 20 minutes took 10.
When they reached the St. Dominic emergency room, someone asked if he could walk. He said yes. He made it about 10 steps before he collapsed, staring up at the ceiling with one clear thought running through his mind: This is not good.
The team got him back fast. His vitals were staggering: blood pressure at 225/160, heart rate around 225, blood sugar near 400. They worked to calm him and moved quickly to the cath lab, where they placed an Impella device through his groin and into his heart to ease the load and let it rest.
He would stay on that device for three days. What Bobby didn’t know yet was that his body was fighting a battle on more than one front.
The Complication Nobody Saw Coming
Buried in his bloodwork was a staph infection Bobby had likely carried in before he ever reached the hospital. Staph tends to attack the weakest part of the body or any foreign object, which meant it went straight for the Impella. When the device came out, his body didn’t respond the way it should have.
Then came a high fever, and then pneumonia. His heart still wasn’t working correctly. Bobby landed in the ICU, where the care, in his words, was excellent.
He remembers one night that still stops him. He was resting his eyes when a nurse came in for the usual checks. He felt a strange pressure. Then he heard the word every patient dreads.
“Clear.”
The defibrillator brought him back. His heart had gone into a dangerous rhythm and then flatlined. The team got him back into rhythm, and slowly, things began to steady.
Choosing the Path Forward
The staph infection wasn’t done, though. Bobby spent 15 days in the hospital, five of them on a ventilator in a medically induced state that finally let his body rest. “I was fighting without knowledge,” he says. That pause was exactly what he needed.
He had a long conversation with Catherine Lowe, MD, his cardiologist, whom he still describes as wonderful. John Calhoun, MD, would be his surgeon. Together, the team made a careful call: no surgery, stents or bypass until they cleared the staph. There was no need to open him up in the middle of an active infection.
So they sent him home with antibiotic infusions three times a day, home health checking on him and an infectious disease team checking on him daily. “Very good people,” Bobby says. “Outstanding.”
When it was finally time to decide on surgery, the team asked Bobby for his opinion.
He answered like himself. “I’m the kind of guy, if I go to a steakhouse, I don’t order fish. And if I go to a fish house, I don’t order steak.”
Bypass it was. But first, he needed to rebuild his strength. Over the next few weeks, Bobby started walking and doing everything he could to speed the healing process. When surgery day came, everything went well.
“He was pleased. She was pleased. I was pleased,” Bobby says. “My family was very pleased.”
The People He Won’t Forget
Ask Bobby about St. Dominic, and he doesn’t talk about the building. He talks about the people.
“I can’t thank St. Dominic, the hospital, the building,” he says. “But the people, the knowledge, the compassion, all the above, were tremendous.”
He remembers Dr. Lowe, whom he credits with saving his life. He remembers Dr. Calhoun, one of the sharpest dressers he’s ever seen outside of scrubs, who did what Bobby calls a perfect job.
He remembers the nurse who came running into his room on a rough day, took hold of his gown and went full drill sergeant: “You are not going to die on my watch.” He remembers the chaplain, a young woman who prayed over him every single day.
And he remembers the visitors he still can’t fully explain. On two occasions, people he didn’t know gathered near his bed and prayed for him by name. They weren’t wearing wings or halos, he says, just regular people. When he asked the ICU staff about them later, they told him no one had been there. Bobby doesn’t push the point. He just knows what he experienced. “St. Dominic is full of angels,” he says.
The Long Road Back
Recovery took time. Bobby has plates and wires holding him together now. He was out of work about four and a half months in all.
A big part of that climb happened in cardiac rehab, and it became one of his favorite chapters. “Those folks, they work you,” he says. “But they monitor you. They watch you.” He did 40 or 45 sessions and never missed one. The doors opened at 7 a.m., but Bobby was there at 6:45, just to get in early and talk with the team.
Those relationships stuck. In rehab, he discovered a staff member had known a former owner of his company. He traded messages between rehab team members and old friends who’d once lived in the same town. What started as therapy turned into community.
“Somewhere along the way those people became my friends,” Bobby says.
A Different Kind of Life
Bobby came out of this changed, and he’ll tell you so plainly.
“I used to drive really fast. Felt like I was late all the time,” he says. “I don’t speed anymore.”
He’s gentler with his words now. He pays closer attention to the person having a hard day. During work meetings, when he senses someone is struggling, he follows up afterward with a simple question: “Hey, what’s up? How can I help?”
He’s rethinking his timeline, too. He once planned to retire at 65. Now he’s thinking closer to 60, because life is short and can be taken in a minute.
His perspective even reached his family. Last Thanksgiving, his younger brother in Missouri called to say he was going to get checked out, though he felt fine. Two days before Christmas, that brother had the exact same triple bypass Bobby did. Later, the two men compared scars. “He wouldn’t have done that without me going through it first,” Bobby says.
At home, life looks quieter and sweeter. Bobby and his wife, Treena, have been married 36 years, high school sweethearts who’ve spent nearly four decades together. Their two kids are grown and building lives of their own, one a physician assistant in Phoenix who happened to spend part of her training in the same cardiac unit where her dad was treated.
These days, Bobby still tells good stories, still gives everybody hugs and still gardens when the season’s right, putting up hundreds of jars of pickles for family and friends.
The Heart of Living Big
Bobby will tell you the whole experience was, strangely, one of the best things that ever happened to him. It slowed him down. It softened him. It reminded him what a heartbeat is really for.
“Life is very important,” he says. “Seize every moment and appreciate everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. Find the positive.”
Today, Bobby drives slower. He really listens to people. Life feels bigger now. He put his heart into running for so long. Now he puts his heart into living.
