Cardio: Randy Peters, Dr. Edward Zajac
Randy, we want to hear you sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” (or the national anthem.)

Randy Peters does not seem to fit the typical profile of someone ripe for a heart attack. For years, this classically trained singer kept in great shape, touring coast to coast with professional opera companies and musical theaters.

He might have gained a little weight once he settled back home in Sergeant Bluff several years ago. But a heart attack? Randy is only 44 years old.

“The perception is that coronary artery disease is an old person’s disease,” says Edward J. Zajac, Jr., M.D., a board-certified cardiovascular surgeon with Mercy Medical Center-Sioux City. “Many who have heart attacks are in the prime of their lives.”

Randy was in this category, and though in his 40s had a heart attack so severe that it required a triple by-pass. More frightening, perhaps, was that he was celebrating Independence Day hours from home when he realized what was happening to him.

“I’d been picnicking, boating and swimming on July 4 [2006] with friends and family,” he says. “I had strange symptoms all day, but that evening I felt like I’d been hit by a bat.”
He went straight to the local hospital, where emergency room staff gave him a choice, a transfer to one of two hospitals.

“It was a no-brainer for me,” Randy says. “I chose Mercy. I was absolutely comfortable and thrilled to go there. I know they are known for heart care, and they’re 25 blocks from my house.”

Randy might not have known it at the time, but he would have had to go all the way to Chicago for care of the same caliber as what awaited him at Mercy. In yearly rankings of 5,000 hospitals nationwide, independent analysts at HealthGrades® place the Mercy Heart Center in the top 10 percent in the entire nation.

Mercy boasts HealthGrades’® five-star rating for Coronary Intervention Procedures such as angioplasty and stent placement. It is also home to Iowa’s top-rated catheterization lab, where patients who need life-saving balloon angioplasties get them quicker than patients in two-thirds of hospitals in the U.S.

Randy needed many of these top-rated services that night, and the Mercy Air Care helicopter rushed him back to Sioux City.

“I was very nervous,” he says. “But I was comforted by the staff. I was totally well-informed about what was going on, what was going to happen.”

The net result of Randy’s emergency care was balloon angioplasty of two arteries and insertion of a stent in a third.

“Randy’s situation could have been fatal if he had not gotten the appropriate, expedient care he required,” Dr. Zajac says. “Instead, he left the hospital 24 hours after he arrived, with no impediments to his lifestyle.”

Randy was inspired to change his lifestyle, however. With support of his friends and family and help from Mercy’s Cardiac Rehabilitation Program, he now exercises regularly, eats better and has lost 50 lbs.

Heart patients could go to other hospitals for care, but they’d have to go all the way to Chicago for care as good that available at Mercy Medical Center-Sioux City. Randy, for one, is glad that trip wasn’t part of his July 4 holiday.