Testimonials

Jungle Stalker

As Garfield Beckstead made his way through the jungles of Zimbabwe last summer, he was unaware that a silent stalker was with him, waiting for the kill. But his stalker had no fur or fangs; it was his own beating heart.

“I hadn’t been feeling well for several days during the hunt, but I thought it was indigestion or stomach problems.” Garfield recalls. “I even went into a clinic in Victoria Falls and had the doctor check me out. They said everything was fine from the heart standpoint, so I engaged in some wishful thinking and headed back out into the bush. I’m in good shape, and I’m used to hunting hard. We all think we’re indestructible until something happens.”

As it turns out, Garfield had been having a heart attack for three to four days. The heart attack culminated with excruciating pain, even as Garfield was taking down his own prey. “I took a large trophy elephant on the fifth day of the hunt,” he says. “As the elephant was dying, I was dying with it.”

Garfield collapsed there in the jungle. His professional hunter used a cell phone to call a Medical Air Rescue Plane (MARS) and at Garfield’s instruction contacted MedjetAssist. MedjetAssist personnel made contact with the MARS crew, as the plane made the 90-mile journey from its home base to Victoria Falls where Garfield was waiting, his health steadily declining. As the plane landed to pick him up, Garfield went into full cardiac arrest.

“I actually died, but they used a defibrillator and brought me back. The plane took me to Johannesburg, where I had heart surgery and spent several weeks recovering.”

The private hospital in Johannesburg where Garfield was treated was well known to MedjetAssist as a cardiac center of excellence. In fact, only a month before Garfield was admitted, MedjetAssist Executive Vice President Phillip Morris had visited with the hospital’s Chief Executive Officer and Managed Care staff. That professional relationship and MedjetAssist staff’s ongoing contact with Garfield and his son during Garfield’s hospital stay helped ease the family’s concerns during the recovery period.

Because Garfield’s case was serious, he wasn’t medically stable enough to fly internationally until several weeks after his surgery. When he was well enough to go home, MedjetAssist proposed a solution that appealed to Garfield as the best way to get him home quickly and safely. He explains: “MedjetAssist could have flown me home in a small private jet, but that would have been a much longer trip in terms of air times and refueling stops. In my case, since I was on the mend by the time I was transported, they very cleverly arranged for me to fly commercial in a first class cabin with a medical doctor, an EMT and all the equipment they needed to take care of me. When we landed in Atlanta, they put me on a medical air ambulance and took me to a hospital near my home in Fort Myers, Florida.”

Garfield now says that the value of MedjetAssist is not only its ability to transport patients in a medical emergency but also its role as an advocate and arranger for the patient. “They did an excellent job in that way – working out the details and making the arrangements at each stage,” Garfield says. “They went way above and beyond the call of duty. Now, I’m a real MedjetAssist evangelist. The truth is: If you look at doing this kind of stuff without protection from a company like MedjetAssist, it’s kind of foolish.”

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