Friday, October 19, 2007
DOUG BINDER
The Oregonian Staff
Galen Rupp gave his coach and mentor, Alberto Salazar, two choices last week when Salazar began to feel dizzy and experienced an uncomfortable sensation in his neck:
He would either call an ambulance or run for his car to drive Salazar to Eugene’s Sacred Heart Hospital.
Rupp drove Salazar to the hospital on Oct. 10 and doctors immediately elected to install a stent in Salazar’s left anterior descending artery, which was discovered to be 90 percent blocked.
Salazar said he had an appointment to have the same procedure performed by his doctor in Portland on Oct. 16, but that symptoms of the closely monitored situation came on quickly.
“The artery had closed up more than we thought,” Salazar said Thursday.
Salazar, who suffered a serious heart attack on the Nike campus on June 30, has spent the summer recovering from the event that hospitalized him for a week. In the weeks following his release, he felt well enough to resume exercising and was running up to four miles a day at as eight-minute-per-mile pace.
He led a group of runners, including Rupp, an All-American at Oregon, and Adam and Kara Goucher, through a high-altitude training camp in Park City, Utah. He then accompanied the trio to Japan for the World Championships, and afterward traveled with them to Europe.
Salazar said his doctors were monitoring the partially closed artery throughout the summer. It was 60 percent closed at the time he had the heart attack and underwent surgery to place a stent in his right coronary artery and a defibrillator in his chest.
Salazar was in Eugene and said he jogged a block and a half to meet Rupp at his apartment before the dizzy spell started.
Rupp was standing near Salazar when Salazar suffered his initial heart attack in June.
“Fortunately Galen was with me,” Salazar said. “I was close to having another (heart attack). (Doctors told me) it probably would have happened within another day.”
