From writing headlines to being the headline…
During 20 years in the media sector, Rich Pooley was a champion of the Northern Rescue Helicopter cause, reporting on the work of the Northland air ambulance service countless times as editor of the Mangawhai Focus newspaper.
He never thought he’d be ‘that guy’ needing an urgent flight from the Northern Rescue helicopter base to Auckland Hospital after suffering heart issues which required him to have two stents on July 15, 2024. His LAD (left anterior descending) artery was 99% blocked so Rich was a lucky man.
Even more ironic is that since stepping away from media and taking time to recover, Rich has ended up working as a health care assistant in the cardiac catheterisation lab at Whangārei Hospital – a job in which he has plenty of empathy to offer to patients.
It’s a throwback to similar work he did at the same hospital in the 1990s, only now he is more aware of the regularity of the Northern Rescue choppers landing on the roof to offer the kind of help he received on that fateful day.
“I did not cardiac arrest so I guess I am lucky for that because I easily could have. I was actually in the emergency department for six hours the day before I had my heart attack because I had some chest pains – like I had a couple of weeks earlier, but I thought nothing of that event. I was cleared medically after tests and monitoring and advised to come back if I had any more symptoms.”
“I remember waking up the next morning with a pain in my chest about 6.15am but I still did not think I was having a heart attack. The pain started to elevate and got much worse.”
After being taken back to hospital, Rich underwent a tombstone ECG.
While hearing medical staff mentioning the likes of ‘heart attack’ and ‘helicopter’, Rich recalls telling his wife Amie that he had a newspaper to put out that week.
Before he left Whangārei, he wanted to tell his team he might need to take a day off work. The same thing happened a short time later on the roof of Auckland Hospital, when he wanted to remind them he’d be back on Wednesday.
“By 10am on the Monday I had been stented and was in Auckland coronary care and accepted I might need more than a day off work. What I went through is a very real thing but it takes on a lot of different guises and I did not have a huge array of symptoms. I was fit and healthy and now everybody is worried about me except me!”
