For years it seemed to Bradley Boyce that every time October or November rolled around he would wind up in the hospital. Usually it was for kidney stones, which he’s battled since childhood, or arthritis, likely the result of wrestling or playing football in his teens. This year, October was barely five days along when Boyce, a 47-year-old warehouse worker from Winchester, felt an unfamiliar dizziness.

He’d gotten home from his late shift at a warehouse in Martinsburg at 2:30 that Monday morning and had taken his three Chihuahuas out into the yard to do their duty. The sudden dizzy spell yanked away Boyce’s equilibrium. He took several steps in his flat back yard, trying to regain his balance, but it felt as if he were walking up a steep hill. Then, just as abruptly as the dizziness appeared, it vanished

“I thought I was tired,” he recalls. “I put the dogs in their kennels and decided to lie down in our spare room.”

His wife Janet, rising for her job at a local hardware store, came down the hall past the spare room.

“I saw her,” says Boyce, “and I just got this tremendous pain in my chest. I feel my left side going. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t have any speech.”

Feeling nauseous he got up and tried to make it across the hall to the bathroom. But his right side went numb and he collapsed. The sound of his fall alerted his wife. The next thing Boyce remembers was Janet telling him the rescue squad was on the way.

At the emergency room at Winchester Medical Center, doctors found Boyce to be in cardiogenic shock—a “perfect storm” of conditions that prevent the heart from functioning. Boyce remembers hearing the term “double heart attack.” The condition is usually fatal and for a patient to have any chance requires an immediate and well organized medical effort backed by highly skilled professionals. In which instance, Boyce had come to the right place.

When Boyce woke up later that day in the cardiac care unit, Dr. Neil Gaither, a WMC cardiologist, told him he’d inserted two stents into his completely blocked arteries. “He’s a great doctor,” says Boyce. “He was very reassuring. Just pleased to see I made it. He said ‘Hey, you came in in complete heart block. Your EKG was showing tombstones.’”

When his mother came to visit him she asked why he thought he’d survived. “I think it’s just because I fought so hard,” he says. “My wife said I kept telling her that everything was going to be okay. To me that means I was fighting it. I don’t know how other people deal with illnesses. I just dug down deep somehow and fought it, like it was just another bump in the road.”

He also found out from his mother that other members of his family had heart issues. “Come to find out, my heart problem was genetic,” he says. In fact, two weeks after his episode, Boyce’s uncle in Elkins, West Virginia, suffered a heart attack and was transferred from a hospital in Morgantown to Winchester Medical Center where he was successfully treated.

Boyce enrolled in a cardiac rehab program at WMC, and now is back to work. He expressed appreciation for the level of care he received—something, he says, that hasn’t changed since his childhood days with kidney stones.

“Looking at everything they did for me here I have to say I have no complaints at all,” says Boyce. “Everybody in the CCU—the nurses, the doctors—gave me the best care. From getting me a drink of water to telling me ‘Hey, if you get hungry, just say so.’ To me that goes a long way.”