Roy and Kim Reid started a Memorial Day weekend with dinner and a movie at home. When Kim went to bed, Roy decided to watch another film. At some point, he fell asleep on the couch.
Around 2 a.m., Roy jolted awake in intense pain.
It felt like someone was punching a hole through his chest and squeezing the life out of his heart. He managed to reach the bedroom to wake up Kim. "I think I'm having a heart attack," he said.
At the hospital near their home in Longwood, Florida, a nurse noticed that Roy had lost feeling in his arms and legs. To him, that signaled something more serious – a life-threatening condition called an aortic dissection. Tests confirmed those suspicions: the wall of Roy's aorta, the main artery carrying blood away from the heart, had torn.
He needed open-heart surgery – somewhere else. Roy was airlifted to a better-equipped hospital in nearby Orlando. Doctors replaced a valve and the upper arch of his aorta.
After the six-hour surgery, doctors put Roy in a medically induced coma for a week to allow his brain and body to recover more gently from all the trauma he'd endured. Kim and the youngest of their four children, a daughter in high school, stayed at the hospital all week, sleeping in chairs in a waiting room. Every time Kim heard an emergency call over the intercom, she held her breath until hearing the room number.
It was never Roy's. When Roy came to, he felt like he'd woken up in the middle of a plane crash. He was relieved and terrified.
He was .