EDMONTON - A steamfitter whose work includes unclogging pipelines in the oilpatch, Glen Nichols woke up on the night of Nov. 10, 2013 in the midst of a heart attack.

“It felt like an elephant hit me in the chest,” Nichols, who is 46 and lives in Fort McMurray, says. “I had received medical training, so when I felt the symptoms, I knew I was in trouble.”

Instead of undergoing major surgery, Nichols had his heart function restored using a groundbreaking procedure called retrograde angioplasty that in Canada is only being performed at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton and at one hospital each in Montreal and Toronto.

“It was put to me like this: I could either have my chest cracked open like a meat rack at a barbecue or I could try something new that works and is far less invasive,” Nichols says. “The choice was pretty clear.”

Nichols was sedated and awake during the half-hour procedure, and was discharged the next morning. Had he undergone open-heart bypass surgery, Nichols would have been hospitalized a minimum of five days and endured a much longer recovery.

“It turned out that 90 per cent of my arteries were blocked,” says Nichols, who had never experienced any other symptoms before the heart attack. “I was a dead man walking.”

Clearing his arteries in much the same way Nichols cleans out pipelines, Dr. Raymond Leung inserted thin strands of wire through Nichols’ wrists and blazed a trail to his heart from two directions through a maze of arteries, blood vessels, and microscopic channels. After eliminating the blockages, Leung also inserted a stent, or tiny mesh tube, to keep one of the more troublesome arteries from clogging again.

“It is kind of similar to plumbing, where you decide to send a Roto-Rooter down to unplug a drain or you go through the basement and approach the blockage from down below,” says Dr. Leung, who has been refining the technique at the CK Hui Centre. “In this case, I do both.”

Pioneered by a surgeon in Tokyo who has visited the Hui Centre twice to mentor and observe Leung and two other surgeons, the retrograde procedure is being performed in Edmonton about 80 times a year, a fourfold increase over five years. Leung recently returned from Hong Kong, where he demonstrated the procedure for other doctors, and has been working with physicians in Calgary and Vancouver who are in the infant stages.

“Hopefully, through education, we can teach more doctors so it can be offered to patients around the world,” Leung says.

On the night he had a heart attack, Nichols dialed 911, and within a few hours was evacuated on an emergency flight to Edmonton. The next morning doctors at the University of Alberta Hospital restored blood flow to one of his arteries with a standard angioplasty but failed in an attempt to unblock another, and then referred him to the Hui Heart Centre.

On Wednesday, Nichols travelled to Edmonton to help Leung promote the procedure.

“If I can save somebody else’s life and advance the technology by talking about it, a five-hour drive is nothing to me,” Nichols says. “I want to help get the message out.

“Dr. Leung calls himself the plumber. In my case, he snaked the line.”

mklinkenberg@edmontonjournal.com

Twitter.com/@martykej