Do the right thing: Jonathan Harrison, MD

Noah Nelson was showering after a workout when the symptoms struck: nausea, blurred vision, numbness in his lower arms. He called into work and went home to lie down. It was then he felt the most severe pain he’d ever felt – a piercing pain “like an ice pick shoved into my chest.”  

Once he could move again, he went to urgent care. The doctor there diagnosed him with an upper respiratory infection and told him to call back if he didn’t feel better in the morning. He didn’t. 

“In the back of my mind, I was like, this is what you hear about heart attack symptoms,” Noah said. But he didn’t fit the bill. He was 22 and healthy. “The doctor’s going to know more than me,” he figured. 

He went back to urgent care, this time at Intermountain Medical Center (IMED) in Murray, Utah. The team there, too, thought a heart attack seemed unlikely, but they administered an EKG just to be sure. The results were so off-the charts the team thought the machine might have malfunctioned. They got another machine and tried again.  

The results were clear: Noah was in ST-elevation myocardial infarction, or STEMI. 

“It was a complete blockage of his left anterior descending artery,” said Jonathan Harrison, MD. The blockage had lasted more than 30 hours – it’s rare to survive more than an hour.

After consulting with Dr. Harrison and the cardiology team, the urgent care team activated the STEMI protocol. An ambulance rushed Noah to the emergency room at IMED, and then quickly from there to the cardiac catheterization lab. Dr. Harrison met him there. 

“We went right in and were able to get a wire past that blockage,” Dr. Harrison said. “Then we used a balloon to push the plaque away and we were able to restore blood flow. We used intravascular imaging to see the size of the vessel and place a stent.” 

Dr. Harrison’s work that day doubtless saved Noah’s life, but what stands out to Dr. Harrison is that, had it not been for the work of the entire team, from urgent care to the emergency room, none of it could have happened at all. 

It can be daunting to activate a protocol like STEMI, he noted, which cascades urgent action from dozens of caregivers – and in Noah’s case, it was difficult to recognize the right thing to do. He’s grateful to play a role on what he calls “the A-team" at IMED. 

In fact, it was a STEMI case much like Noah’s – at IMED – that got Dr. Harrison interested in cardiology in the first place. His father was a mechanical engineer, and although Dr. Harrison was always fascinated by medicine, he initially set out to combine the two. 

“I went into biomedical engineering thinking maybe I could come up with a device that might help millions of people,” he said, “and I thought that’s what I wanted to do, but I didn’t get that sense of connection.” 

So after a year at Medtronic, he went to medical school, during which he did a clinical rotation on the cardiac unit at IMED. That’s where he first saw a STEMI protocol in action. 

“It blew my mind that you could do something so remarkable without invasive surgery,” he said. “And I saw that I had made the right choice. I wasn’t going to save millions of people with a single device, but I could help this one person, and that was the connection I was looking for.” 

He could see the direct impact his work had on patients like Noah, who, it turned out, had a cholesterol level three times the upper limit of normal, due to a genetic condition called familial hyperlipidemia. He now takes daily medication and gets an injection every couple of weeks to treat it. For most intents and purposes, he’s pretty much back to normal. 

He’s grateful for the care he got, but he’s also grateful for the time Dr. Harrison took just to chat with him, to foster that human connection. 

“I’m a very inquisitive person,” Noah said. “It was such a big experience I wanted to make sense of it. I did a whole bunch of reading and came to my follow-ups prepared with questions. Dr. Harrison explained the science behind it in a way that I could understand.” 

For Dr. Harrison, that’s what makes it worthwhile. 

“That’s why I chose medicine,” he said. “You just do the right thing for the person in front of you.”