Stroke turns cardiologist into a patient

AUSTINTOWN — “I feel dizzy” were the last coherent words uttered by Dr. Richard T. Esper Jr. for many days.

Though he couldn’t speak, his mind was racing, though not always rationally.

“I knew I was going to fall, so I tried not to fall on the floor and turned and fell on the bed,” he said.

Dr. Esper, an Austintown cardiologist, was dressing in his bedroom at 6 a.m. April 24, 2007, and had only to put on his tie before leaving for work at the Heart Center of Northeastern Ohio in Youngstown, where he is a partner.

He was planning to kiss goodbye his son, Anthony, who was 2 months old and slept in his parents’ bedroom.

It was then that he felt dizzy and collapsed.

“Dema [his wife] was talking, but I couldn’t answer. I wondered why she was so panicked.”

He said he was “pretty angry” when Dema pulled him off the bed onto the floor because “she was wrinkling my shirt and I was going to have to change before I went to work.”

“I heard my daughter [Catherine] crying in her room, and I thought, ‘I’ll have to put my kid back to sleep.’”

“What am I going to tell my office manager about rescheduling patients because I am late,” he remembers thinking.

He heard emergency room doctors saying they were going to give him “ytics,” (fibrinolytics, clot busting medicine) and wondered why, because he was “just a little dizzy.”

“I thought the nurses and doctors were in my bedroom and they were going to give me an X-ray. I was worried they were going to irradiate my son.”

In the meantime, Dema, a registered dietician, called her husband’s brother, Stephen, then an anesthesiology resident at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and told him what was happening. He said to call 911.

For the complete story, see Tuesday’s Vindicator and Vindy.com.