Thursday, March 20, 2025
Scott Hanson, of Long Beach, was skiing at Killington, in Vermont, on New Year’s Eve. He’s a member of the Sperry Ski Club, a group of Long Islanders who have a lodge on the mountain, and he was celebrating the holiday with his fellow club members.
Hanson, 68, has always been active, and loves to play pickleball in addition to being an avid skier. While on the slopes, however, he started to feel winded, out of breath. He chalked it up to not having skied in a few years. So he didn’t think much of it, and on New Year’s Day he drove home.
About a week later, Hanson began to feel faint, and once again had difficulty breathing, as if someone was putting immense pressure on his chest. He knew something wasn’t right, so he called his daughter Heather McNally, one of his six children.
She told him to call 911. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived at his home on New York Avenue.
“When they got there, I said, ‘I can walk on my own,’” Hanson recounted. “I didn’t want anyone fussing over me. So I got in the ambulance on my own, laid on the stretcher and off we went. I said, ‘No lights and sirens, let’s just keep it on the q.t.’ And then it all went horribly wrong from there.”
When the ambulance arrived at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital, in Oceanside, Hanson underwent an EKG and other tests, and what they revealed shocked him and his family: He had suffered a massive heart attack, and the right side of his heart was completely blocked. The attack also tore a hole in his heart — huge in medical terms, 8 centimeters long and 5 centimeters wide. Surgeons installed a balloon pump in his heart, and transferred him to Mount Sinai in Manhattan for further treatment.
“In his case, he sort of was lingering on and was what we call ‘completing the heart attack,’ so the muscle was actively dying,” Dr. Robin Varghese, director of cardiovascular critical care at Mount Sinai, explained. “What happened is, the muscle became so weak, he tore a hole inside his heart.”
The right side of the heart carries the blood without oxygen and the left side carries it with oxygen, and the two flows are not supposed to mix. Hanson’s attack affected the wall of muscle in between, which became so weak that, at one point when the heart squeezed, it ripped open and blood started moving in the wrong direction. The mortality rate for this condition, Varghese said, is 50 to 75 percent.
That would get anyone’s attention, but it hit the Hanson family especially hard. In 2019, Hanson lost his wife of 35 years, Noreen, who suffered cardiac arrest and was in a coma for 54 days. The family didn’t have the best experience with doctors at the time, and so last month, Hanson’s children were frightened.
“As a daughter, and knowing everything that happened to our mom, and having gone through all that, we were in an utter panic,” Heather said. “‘How is this happening again? How could this be? How could this happen to our family two times? Are we going to lose him?’ We were really scared and nervous.”
Varghese explained to the family that Scott’s heart muscles were so weak that if surgeons tried to sew the hole closed immediately, the sutures wouldn’t hold.
So they first removed the balloon pump and replaced it with an Impella, a slightly more powerful pump, to help the blood flow and decrease the volume that was moving in the wrong direction. Hanson spent two weeks in the ICU, and on Jan. 21 it was time for surgery.
“After two weeks, we got him in the best shape as we could, and then we decided to go head to the operating room and repair this hole in the heart,” Varghese said. “That was an eight- or nine-hour surgery. We opened up the whole heart, found the hole and patched the hole. Normally, these holes are 1 to 2 centimeters. We did a bypass for him, we repaired one of the valves in the heart and then we came out of the operating room with that pump still in. By God’s grace, he did well over the next couple days.”
Hanson’s recovery was slow and a little painful, but as the days passed he started to show progress. He began walking on his own, and eventually worked his way up to 1,000 steps a day. On Feb. 4, he marked a major milestone in his recovery: He went home.
“We didn’t have any of those feelings that we did with our mom this time,” Heather said. “We knew right away that we were in the right place, and we had the right people on our side. They saved our dad’s life.”
Hanson is still recovering, and another of his children, Kristin, has moved back home with him for the time being to help as he continues to recover. He’s walking around, and is showing great progress. He’s been doing so well that he’s starting to get the itch to play pickleball again.
“Everybody in that hospital was supportive,” Hanson said. “Typically the wound looks like a zipper on your chest. So now I’m a member of the very exclusive zipper club.”
