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When we reached the summit I think it was absolutely one of
the greatest feelings I’ve ever had in my life.
It was a combination of exhilaration
and it was kind of like survival.
It was a feeling of survival on a lot of different levels.
The first attempt that I did was in 2009,
I got up to ten thousand, five hundred feet,
felt pretty good but I was going very,
very slowly that day.
And what had happened was I was in an episode of atrial
fibrillation and that really slowed me down.
I felt pretty good that day but then when we got
to ten thousand five the guide looked at me and said
you’ve gone too slowly, our time window has closed,
the snow is too soft, we can’t go on to the summit.
I felt totally defeated.
Labor Day weekend of 2009 my wife Sue Hennessey and I were
sitting and having a glass of wine and I had a stroke.
And then I was admitted to Kaiser Sunnyside Hospital and
was under the care of the most fabulous team of nurses and the
hospitalist that you could have imagined.
They told me exactly what was going on.
After the stroke I had a catheter ablation also
at the Kaiser Sunnyside Hospital and that
basically got rid of the atrial fibrillation.
And it was at that point that I started thinking,
well maybe I can do this mountain again,
I’ve got to look for the right opportunity.
And that right opportunity came when I started to study the
climbing program of the American Lung Association and I got
involved in their Climb for Clean Air.
That’s what lead me to the base of Mt. Hood that day.
And as I came down the mountain I said,
you know something, it’s amazing what
we can do if we put our minds to it.
It’s amazing what a human being can accomplish if we just say
I’m going to do it, these are the criteria
that I’ll do it under.
It’s just absolutely amazing what we can do.
You put one foot in front of the other and you go for it.
It definitely was, I think for me it’s a template for how I’m
going to live the next hopefully 20, 25 years of my life.
The care I got at Kaiser I just can’t extol,
I can’t even begin to tell you how good it was.