My story evolves over nearly two decades, culminating in my death.

It all started in about the early –mid 90’s. I began having trouble with my blood pressure. I went to Dr. after Dr. – Three of my Dr.’s left the practice and I went through several more until 2000. My last Dr.was the most culpable in causing my demise. She had been on maternity leave and her substitute Dr. was trying to get my BP under control. When she came back to her practice, she took me off all my BP meds except for a very low dose of tenormin – the least powerful BP drug on the market. At the time, my BP’s were in the 160/140 to 180/150. Within a month I wound up in the emergency room dead of a total blockage to my right coronary artery. I actually enjoyed dying, but that is a different story. The Dr’s in the emergency room were desperately trying to find a cardiologists to do an angioplasty as they knew that clot busting wouldn’t work on a total blockage and if they gave me blood thinners, then they couldn’t do an angioplasty.

As I went into ventricular fibrillation, the only thing that could save me was defibrillation. I had earlier woken my wife up and asked her to take me to the hospital – I just felt weird and had been up most of the night with a pain in my shoulder like a muscle ache. She looked at me and started getting dressed – I slipped out of my good jeans and put on sweats, as I didn’t want to risk having them cut up in the hospital. We jumped into the car and took off. We went to the hospital a little farther away from our house instead of the closer one. Within 5 minutes of arriving at the hospital they were shocking my heart back with 350 joules. This happened three times. Had we called EMS, they would have taken me to the nearer hospital which had no cardiology center and I would have died. Had we waited for the EMS, I would have died before they arrived.

The second phase of my little tale is the death of my kidneys. Apparently the dye used in the angioplasty coupled with extremely high BP’s after getting out of the hospital 220/180 – I called the cardiologist and he told me I wouldn’t explode. Well within a few months my kidneys failed and I went to a kidney specialist who wanted to give me a false vein in my arm and start me on dialysis immediately. While being tested etc, my kidneys suddenly revived. So it was back to work on my BP control. This kidney Dr. doubled all of my BP meds and added this and that till he got my BP’s down, Unfortunately for me I had many days of 60/40 walking. I feinted and passed out quite frequently. I told the DR and nurses that I was going to lower my meds, and they kept telling me not to self medicate – that the Dr. knew what was best. Of course then my kidneys failed again and they really pressured me to start dialysis with weeks. Never did they lower my BP meds.

I told my wife that I wouldn’t be going back to this clinic as they were trying to kill me, so I went into the transplant program at Duke University. I felt as if I were very close to dying again, and was exploring kidney transplants abroad.

The Dr. who managed my care decided to do some tests and see why I was having such BP problems. Within a day, he had some of the results and it turned out that I didn’t have a high blood pressure problem at all. That all the earlier DR's were treating the symptoms not the problem for the last 15 years.

I had an adrenal problem, which caused all my BP problems including my heart attack, which led to my kidneys failing.

I have a one in a million problem called Conn’s syndrome. It has to do with my adrenal gland and aldosterone. I take a small dose of spironolactin – 50mgs a day and my BP is 120/75 almost always now.

My kidneys and my heart have recovered fairly well, but I will suffer from the heart attack and injured kidneys for the rest of my life, but I have already lived eight more years than I might have.