Verne’s Story: Expanding Cardiac Care at LMH

The moment he felt the first pain in his chest, Verne Brown dismissed it as one of the normal aches and pains that are bound to come up after a stressful week.

It was 2004, and Verne, then in his 50s, was living in Walnut Grove. He’d had a busy week travelling with his kids, then in their teens, who’d been active in Army Cadet events across Canada.

But the pain returned at 2 a.m. and again, when he got up for the day. So he called his doctor, Langley’s Dr. David Hsu. Dr. Hsu told him the pain sounded a lot like a cardiac condition, and he’d best go directly to the Emergency Department at Langley Memorial Hospital (LMH).

After a long day of tests, it was confirmed.

“I’m sure it was somewhere between nine and midnight, they told me I had a heart attack. I couldn’t believe it,” Verne says today.

Verne’s cardiac care team sent him to Royal Columbian Hospital, where surgeons installed a stent in his heart to treat narrow coronary arteries that provide the heart with oxygen-rich blood. He returned to Langley Memorial Hospital to recover in a bed equipped with a telemetry monitor - part of a system that reads abnormal patterns in heartbeat, arrhythmia or atrial fibrillation, which occurs when the heart beats too fast and irregularly.

While Verne was fortunate to recover and stabilize in a bed close to home where his family could visit, his bed was just one of six in LMH’s Critical Care Unit - far too few to meet the demands of Langley as the population continues to boom.

At Hot Havana Nights, the Foundation’s annual gala on October 21, 2023 donors raised about $315,000 to help LMH add four new monitored beds to its cardiac care unit. Verne’s story produced on video inspired the crowd of 300+ guests to give to help complete the campaign.

After his immediate care at LMH, Verne was connected with Langley Memorial surgeon Dr. Rita Wittman. Every year for the next 19 years, he met with Dr. Wittman for a cardiac checkup, involving echocardiograms and heart rate tests.

In the meantime, he and his wife Martha are maintaining a healthy lifestyle, by taking long daily walks together and with friends in their neighbourhood, and he’s keeping up with his cardiac health with Dr. Wittman.

“I went to her last week, and I had tests coming out of my ears,” he laughs. “She’s very thorough.”