January 16, 2010 – Just a Small Heart Attack

Saturday was cold and clear, a typical Minnesota winter day. I decided to go back up to the airport for a second time and try to get the Kawasaki engine off the carriage. My foot was still far from 100% and my back had been bothering me, but I thought I could still go up and accomplish something.
I was there about three hours, and did accomplish what I wanted—removed the engine. It was hard, especially in my state of physical condition. About noon, I closed everything up and headed for home. I had some pain in my chest that I attributed to indigestion or something and even pulled off the freeway to look for a little store to get some Tums or something. Failing to find anything, I continued home. But as I got closer and closer, the chest pains, nausea and loss of equilibrium, and general sense of malaise intensified. But I made it home, about a 20-minute drive. However, as soon as I saw the bed, I collapsed on it. But I knew there was something terribly wrong. I got up and stumbled into the other bedroom where Sandra was, dizzy and literally sliding along the walls, using them to steady myself to keep from falling. Grease stains on the walls that are there even as I write this attests to my inability to maintain my equilibrium. Sandra sensed that here was a serious problem and immediately called 911 for an ambulance. To make the story short, I ended up at Methodist Hospiital in the Cardiac “cath” lab and after the insertion of a second stent (I had received one on 2006 at Gundersen Lutheran in La Crosse), I felt much better. My change of feeling was a night-and-day experience. They found that one of the arteries feeding the heart had a virtual total blockage, and the stent was now providing a passage for normal blood flow to the heart. The physical exertion at the airport probably did not help the condition, but this situation had been most likely developing for some time.
More Research
I have been asking for help from anyone who is willing to give it from Yahoo UL groups, of which there were several. One guy, Dave Engle, in New York, also owns a JetWing and has been willing to get dimensions of the parts that will need to be replaced. He’s great! He also has an owners manual and I have asked him to go have a copy made at my expense and send to me to help with the rebuild.
There are several other guys who popup on the internet when I ask questions. Jerry Pridemore, Ted Bailey, and Mark Overton have both answered questions and provided help and opinions about the project.
The Next Step
I think I need to go back up to the airport and do some further analysis and begin to disassemble the carriage. One important thing that needs to be done is to put the wing together and check out its integrity and see if there’s any damage to it. I know the keel is damaged because I found part of it in with the chopped-up pieces that the EMT’s destroyed. But I don’t know what else might be damaged. I haven’t put it together since the accident. The rebuild decision will be dependent on how many good pieces remain. If there’s substantial damage to the wing or the engine, I might be resigned to deciding it’s not possible to rebuild. We’ll see.

January 2, 2010 – A Visit to Crystal

It’s been a month and a half, Christmas is past, as is New Years Day, and it’s time to get out and around albeit in zero-degree temperatures. Dr. Eberling, my Minneapolis-area orthopedic doctor, has cleared me to be able to walk on the ankle without the boot. I decided to go up and see exactly what the JetWing looked like, since I had not even looked it over once since the accident. Steve had done a fantastic job of cleaning up the pieces and getting it back on the trailer and to our house, where he had put it alongside the garage for storage with a tarp over it. There it had stayed untouched while we were engaged in other things, primarily our preparation to move.
So when I decided to go up to Crystal, I went without any expectation but with some hope that there might be a chance to rebuild the poor, battered, and broken JetWing. Steve had said that he didn’t think there was much if any damage to the wing, and I knew the engine should be OK, so it was worth a shot to see if rebuilding was a possibility.
I drove up by myself, taking the camera to document what the JetWing looked like from all sides so I could study and ponder what to do later. Everything worked out well, and my first challenge, which was to get into the hanger on my own happened without any problem and I was able to get in to see it and check the JetWIng out. As I looked it over, I began to formulate a plan in my mind of what to do. It was pretty substantially damaged, but the nature of an ultralight like that is that it’s not made up of much, just tubing, brackets, nuts and bolts. The critical parts are the wing and engine. Both things could not be checked out easily; the engine needed to be run and tested, and the wing was in the wing bag and I could not even look it over at this point.
However, in spite of this, I began to make plans to rebuild the JetWing.