Restaurateur finds heart help

For six months Ralph Swagler's general practitioner urged him to go to a heart specialist and get checked out.

But Swagler, 58, was having no part of it. Twenty-eight months earlier he had undergone a procedure to put a stent in his heart, and his $1,000-a-month health insurance covered just half of the $58,000 tab.

Then they started to raise his premium, so Swagler canceled it.

"I wasn't going to go check myself into the hospital to spend $10,000 for a day to have them tell me I need a quarter-of-a-million-dollar surgery that I couldn't afford," he said, his voice choked with emotion. "I had people tell me to just go ahead and have the surgery and go bankrupt, but that's not my way of doing things."

So Swagler, owner of Locals BBQ in South Carson City, decided to wait for the inevitable.

"I would have been sitting here today accepting whatever came at me because I didn't know of any other avenue," he said.

Then Swagler ran into a friend who had a similar procedure in Germany, paying a fraction of what it would cost in the U.S. He found another friend had gone to Thailand for bypass surgery.

Swagler, with his health deteriorating, did some hasty Internet research. He contacted the Bangkok Heart Hospital via e-mail. After a few e-mail exchanges with the head cardiac surgeon, Swagler and his son Ryan, 35, hopped a plane to Bangkok on March 24, and walked, unexpected, into the hospital.

"They didn't even know we were coming and instantly they started doing all the tests," he said.

On the fourth day, Swagler underwent a nine-hour surgery where American- and European-trained Thai doctors used veins from his leg and arm for a triple-bypass surgery to save his life.

"My total cost was exactly to the penny what they told me, $24,300."

He and Ryan spent four more days in the hospital. Swagler was then released to check into a Bangkok hotel for the required seven days of follow-up with Heart Hospital doctors.

"I felt good enough that we toured every single square inch of Bangkok," said Swagler, estimating the accommodations and food cost another $1,500. "We had a ball."

Meanwhile, back at home, Swagler's employees and daughter Wendi and her husband kept the restaurant running. Swagler was spared the details of his business during his journey, and said he just recently learned that Ryan was making secretive calls back home to make sure things were going OK.

Also while he was gone, an impromptu fundraiser sprang up at his Eagle Station restaurant and spilled into the parking lot.

The kindness moves Swagler.

"I didn't know about this until I got back. Everybody knows we seat 40, that's our max. There was a night over 100 people showed up. They brought their own tables and chairs. They set up in the parking lot. My staff served them in the parking lot. These were just members of Carson City that wanted to show their support," he said. "To come back and find out what they'd done was overwhelming."

Swagler returned home on June 11, and will have a six-month checkup here in the states, then return to Thailand for a one-year check up.

He said he hopes his story will let others know that, for the un- or under-insured, there are options for people. They don't have to wait to die, or go bankrupt to live.

"Don't give up hope that you can't get medical care. It is available, maybe just not down the street, but it's certainly affordable at other places in this world. I can't say enough about the care. It was all world class," he said. "It really was such a positive thing to find all these positive people here in Carson City and in Thailand. The whole experience was positive."