Brian Doerner, drummer with the rock band Saga, was feeling unusually tired and hungry the day after a gig so he decided to scarf down some fast food and have a nap.
But, as he bit into an onion ring, his left arm went numb and he began sweating profusely - classic signs of a heart attack. Mr. Doerner's spouse, who initially thought he was joking, called 911.
Within minutes of that fateful call last October, firefighters arrived at his Kitchener, Ont., home and administered oxygen. Next came the paramedics. They removed Mr. Doerner's shirt and attached 10 wires to his chest to get an electrocardiogram reading.
The results were then sent electronically to a cardiologist at St. Mary's General Hospital, who received the ECG readings almost instantly.
The cardiologist, scanning the readings on a BlackBerry, knew immediately that Mr. Doerner was suffering a ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), a heart attack caused by a blockage in an artery, and ordered emergency surgery.
As the paramedics bundled him into an ambulance, a surgical suite was prepared and the 49-year-old drummer was delivered directly to the operating room, bypassing the emergency department.
"When I arrived, there was a whole crew waiting for me. I felt like King Fahd," Mr. Doerner said.
He underwent angioplasty - an operation in which a catheter is threaded into the groin and up into the heart, where a balloon is inflated to clear the blocked artery.
And a stent (a wire mesh tube that props open the blood vessel) was inserted.
From the time the call went to 911 to the beginning of the operation, only 77 minutes had passed.
Since they began using the BlackBerry to send ECG readings, the so-called door-to-balloon has been as low as 36 minutes.
Suzanne Renner, an interventional cardiologist at St. Mary's, said that when a person suffers a heart attack, "time is [heart]muscle, so the focus is always time. You want to get the artery open as quickly and efficiently as possible."
More than 50,000 people in Canada suffer heart attacks each year, and ensuring their speedy treatment to prevent death and disability is a major challenge.
In recent years, the focus has been on getting patients to the emergency room quickly so they can be given drugs that can open up the blockages. But clot-busting drugs need to be administered within 30 minutes of a heart attack to be effective, and most patients still require angioplasty afterward.
So, increasingly, the approach is to try to get patients with a STEMI heart attack directly to angioplasty. To be effective and minimize damage from a heart attack, the operation needs to be done within 90 minutes.
World renowned cardiac centres such as the Foothills Hospital in Calgary and the University of Ottawa Heart Institute have been sending STEMI patients directly to surgery for a number of years, with great success.
Using the system, about 80 per cent of patients are treated within the recommended 90 minutes, and the death rate has been cut by half, according to a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
But in those cities, paramedics are trained to read ECGs in the field and determine whether the patient requires immediate surgery, and that decision is reviewed by a cardiologist when they arrive at the hospital. (The paramedics are right about 80 per cent of the time.)
In Kitchener, they have dropped a step: The ECGs are read directly by a cardiologist, thanks to the BlackBerry.
"It's almost like having me in the field. I can read the ECG and even talk to the patient on the phone," Dr. Renner said.
John Prno, the emergency medical services director for the region of Waterloo, said paramedics were a little leery of the new protocol at the outset, but soon embraced it.
"They just have to do it once and they're sold. They realize it saves lives," he said.
While paramedics don't have to read ECGs in the field, he noted that they still have a lot of responsibility in determining whether a heart attack victim is potentially a STEMI and a candidate for quick surgery.
"They're careful about making the call because it puts a whole lot of things into motion," Mr. Prno said.
Research In Motion, based in Waterloo, donated the BlackBerrys for the project. The only cost was getting new data plans for the paramedics, which runs about $5,000 a year in total.
"We save heart muscle every minute, so it's a pretty small price to pay," Mr. Prno said.
Mr. Doerner wholeheartedly agrees.
He said that, because of the quick response, he suffered no damage to his heart or his brain. In fact, he was home within 48 hours of surgery and, bolstered by the fact that he has given up smoking and drinking, his stamina has improved greatly.
That is a great benefit in a job with the physical demands of drumming, and Mr. Doerner said he feels reborn.
"I could have died but now I'm more ready than ever to rock 'n' roll."