He Preaches Need for Prevention
Jim Bloor was 41 and physically fit, with no history of heart trouble, when he began having chest pains during a visit to Los Angeles in 1997. Doctors initially told him he was “too young” for cardiac problems.
As a cardiologist performed a stress test to pin down the symptoms, Bloor went into cardiac arrest. His heart stopped. Hospital workers called a “code blue.” Doctors revived him, and later tests found that his blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides--another type of fat in the blood--were at unhealthful levels.
To this day, doctors aren’t sure what happened, or whether the daily cocktail of AIDS medications that he has been taking since 1996 may have played a role in stopping his heart. He had a defibrillator--a device that shocks a heart back into beating normally--implanted in his chest to minimize the risk of his heart’s stopping again.
That frightening experience--and the realization that he now had two serious illnesses to cope with--drove him to anger and depression. He defied his doctors’ advice to take better care of his health, by smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods and occa- sionally using recreational drugs.
“I felt like the AIDS was enough” to deal with, says Bloor, who subsequently developed a heart valve problem and erratic heart rhythms.
Over time, and with the help of counseling, Bloor turned his anger into something constructive. He became an advocate for better cardiac care for HIV patients like himself. He warned friends and strangers that four of his most physically fit pals, the oldest of whom was 43, had “gone cardiac on me--stents, bypasses, valve repairs, you name it.”
As a contributing writer to Frontiers, a national newsmagazine for gays and lesbians, Bloor realized he had a platform to warn others who could be at risk.
In August he wrote a first-person piece that warned other HIV-positive people to pay more attention to their heart health. He says most people don’t realize that the virus--and the medications--can have damaging effects on their hearts.
Other HIV-positive gay men began to contact him. They, too, had felt blindsided by chest pain, heart attacks and sudden angioplasties to clear clogged coronary arteries. Some said they had thought they were the only ones with such problems until they read his story.
When a friend, John Pinnell, casually mentioned that he was having some chest pain during a telephone call in December 2000, Bloor called the nursing supervisor at the hospital in Santa Monica where Pinnell worked as a cardiac technician, asking that Pinnell be examined.
As it turned out, Pinnell underwent an angioplasty that day and was given a stent and prescribed many of the same heart medications that Bloor takes.
Cardiac problems among HIV-positive men taking protease inhibitors should be a warning sign to anyone who views AIDS as a manageable chronic illness and, as a result, doesn’t bother to practice safe sex. Bloor wants to convey the message that “this is what can happen to you. We haven’t cured AIDS yet.”
“If gay men read that you can have a heart attack at 40, no matter how many times you go to the gym,” he says, “then maybe they’ll think twice about their risky sexual behaviors.”
