Govt-assisted heart patient

Press, 31 August 1984, Page 5

Govt-assisted heart patient

PA Auckland A Papatoetoe man, Mr Greg Thompson, yesterday flew to Sydney for special open-heart surgery, the first New Zealander to do so on Government funds. He said that although the $13,000 operation had only a 90 per cent success rate, surgery was preferable to years of suffering adverse drug effects. . Mr Thompson, a nursery assistant, aged 35, has Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, which can suddenly quadruple his heart rate from the normal 72 beats a minute to 250 or 300. “It can kill you instantly,” he said. “It is very frightening. It gets you in the throat, you feel strange and

dizzy, and it sounds like there’s someone inside trying to get out with a hammer. “You have just got to lie there when your heart starts fluttering like that. It could just stop, and you would go out like a light.” Mr Thompson, who is married with two small sons, said he was looking forward to beginning life again once his “electrical fault” was fixed. The Sydney operation was arranged by an Auckland cardiologist, Dr Warren Smith, who first identified the probelm and had a special machine built at Green Lane Hospital to map Mr Thompson’s heart beat.