Sobering: Surf legend floored by massive heart attack!

The creator of modern pro surfing reveals the three steps that saved his life…

A couple of weeks ago, July 13 if you wanna be specific, baseball-bat swinging, send-the-king-of-the-Hui-to-jail hell-raiser Ian “Kanga” Cairns was floored by a heart attack while surfing at Laguna Beach.

Kanga, a man with the physique of a comic-book hero who ruled big waves and who was pivotal in the creation of a world tour, had what’s called in the game, a “widow maker” heart attack, a total blockage of of the left anterior artery, which supplies blood to the heart.

“If we had not done things right in the first half hour, this would be an obituary,” says Kanga, sixty-seven. “It’s very surreal actually, you’re in the emergency room in dire straights, with a foot in the grave and an hour later, you wake up after surgery and feel great. In retrospect, I did have warning signs, I’ve been getting winded walking up hills, which I passed off as getting old. I had some chest pressure similar but milder than the attack, but it quickly passed, I did have an episode walking up the stairs after surfing, where I felt winded and a little dizzy and sat for a while. This last episode should have been a wakeup call that something weird was up, but we’re invincible and we don’t really want to admit to bad health problems.”

Kanga says he did three things that saved his life.

“One, when I felt something wrong in my chest very different to anything ever, I said I need help now. Two, we did not drive, we called the ambulance. They started treatment immediately and called ahead to the hospital who were waiting to immediately admit me, Three, we chose a hospital that was not the closest, but we knew had an excellent stoke/heart department and I was quickly into surgery, getting a stent that opened up the blood flow again.”

Importantly, says Kanga, “Act. Don’t brush it off.”

(Buy Kanga’s 340,000-word, two-volume tell-all memoir, Kanga, here.)