Ron Paley was a cardiac patient for about two weeks in the I.H. Asper Institute at St. Boniface Hospital, where he had triple bypass open-heart surgery in April 2025 to unblock his coronary arteries. His operation was going to be a double bypass, but Paley “got one more for free,” as he puts it with a laugh. “The care was first-class. The people there were phenomenal,” he added.
He almost didn’t make it to surgery at all. At the pre-op appointment in late March, his nurse, Diane, noticed a serious problem with his routine blood and urine test results.
“She said, ‘You’re in serious trouble, Ron. Your kidneys are about to fail.’ I couldn’t believe it,” he remembered. The medications Paley had been taking for his heart, and an unrelated prostate condition had made it hard for him to pass urine, hurting his kidney function. “Diane was my angel. So, she told me I was not going home.”
He was rushed to the fifth floor of the Asper building, where he could be stabilized. On his first night there, his heart rate dropped to about 20 beats per minute, dangerously low.
“They called a Code Blue, cardiac arrest,” he said. “The alarm went off.” Paley doesn’t remember any of it, but his care team brought him back from the edge. With a catheter in place, his kidneys recovered to the point where the urologist cleared him for the bypass surgery only four days later.
“It was quite something. I just can’t tell enough people how effective the nurses and care team were. Everyone there was so positive, and I rebounded quickly,” said Paley.
“I have never been in a facility where I didn’t meet so much as one grumpy person, in a bad mood or having a bad day. Not one in my two weeks there. Everyone who cared for me was friendly, helpful, and caring. It’s just an amazing organization, truly.”
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