Mountaineer to climb Everest three years after severe heart attack

Joanne McQuarrie, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter | [email protected]

UPDATE (May 4): Mountaineer Leonardo Namen was unable to summit Mount Everest due to food poisoning. The Heart of the Summit and Everest 2021 team thanked those who supported the climb.

A severe heart attack on April 12, 2018 - categorized as a “widow maker” by doctors - left them telling experienced mountaineer Leonardo Namen that he might need a transplant if his heart did not recover.

For Edmonton-based Namen, who has been climbing mountains since he was 14 and has summited many peaks across the world over the years, including nearby Mount Robson, it was an overwhelming reality.

The heart attack left him in a weakened state, compounded by a loss of identity and debilitating depression to the point of suicidal thoughts.

But Namen, now 51, found his way through the life-changing challenges. His healing journey will culminate this May with his attempt to summit the 8849-metre-high Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world.

Namen will be the first man in Canada who had a heart attack to summit Mount Everest and the second man in the world who has had a heart attack to do it. He’s doing the climb with a mountaineer from Russia and another from Italy.

The summit will be not only a personal achievement for Namen but an opportunity for him to raise both awareness and funding in support of heart health.

“Heart disease is killing a lot of people,” Namen said. “And women are being misdiagnosed because a lot of attention is being put towards men. Heart disease kills more women than any other disease in the world. 

“My goal is advocating for research about women’s heart health. I’m not saying stop research about men, but we need to close the gap.”

It takes money for such an expedition to happen. One of the two sponsors pulled their funding in 2020. To date, almost $30,000 of the $65,000 of the volunteer fund-raising team’s goal has been raised. Namen leaves Canada on April 3 to join the rest of the 19-member team in Kathmandu. The Government of Nepal has already been paid for permits needed to do the climb and oxygen has been purchased as well. These are non-refundable expenditures.

Sherpas and other members of the 19-member team, including a doctor and a nurse, need to be paid for their services. Namen himself is not getting paid.

“We decided to open a Go Fund Me page,” Namen said. “Even $5 will help. We also have different advertising packages. There’ll be advertising on my suit. The Canadian flag will have sponsors’ names on it.”

Namen said a documentary is being filmed about the expedition and details are being worked out with filmmakers.

“There’s a lot of good opportunities to advertise,” he said.

From March 19 to 21 at Marmot Basin, Namen hosted ‘A Taste of Base Camp.’ It was a live event simulating what the Mount Everest base camp will be like. Namen camped, trained and hiked as he will at the base camp.

The weather that weekend provided a taste of what Namen will experience at Mount Everest, including the 60-70 km/h winds swirling around his tent. At Mount Everest, they’re between 80 and 100 km/h.

Namen’s recovery has been a down-and-up journey of self-realization, gratitude and strength. He clearly remembers the day he had the heart attack. He was at a gym at West Edmonton Mall, training to climb mountains in Europe.

“My son walked by me, said ‘You’re a little bit pale. Slow down,’” Namen said. “I started to feel pain really, really bad, to the point I knew something was going on. I grabbed my bag, tried to leave the gym. I was sweating, my left arm was numb - all of the symptoms they show on TV. I left the gym, sat on the bench across from the gym. I started to lean over on my right side. I said to my son, ‘Grab your mom. Take me to the hospital. I think I’m having a heart attack.’”

His son got him to the nearby Misericordia Community Hospital in five minutes.

“Everything started to fall down after that,” Namen said. “Fifty-five per cent of my heart had stopped.”

After Namen was stabilized, he was transferred to the Royal Alexandra Hospital where a stent was implanted in his heart. The doctors told him it would be a long recovery.

Namen took it day by day. One day, though, hit him particularly hard.

“I decided to go to the basement; I have a gear room there,” he said. “I went down but I couldn’t get back up the stairs. My son and my wife had to help me. That’s when things started going downhill.”

Resentment set in for Namen.

“I started to hate everything and everyone,” he said. “I was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. I could see a long hallway and lights at the end of that hallway started to go off, one by one. I was suicidal.”

But a Facebook link listed in a pamphlet that he had been given when he left the hospital became a turning point for him.

“I joined a group on Facebook, ‘Community of Survivors of Heart Attacks and Stroke,’” Namen said.

He saw a post written by a woman who’d had a heart attack and was in a predicament. One of those hallway lights came back on.

“All of a sudden I started to type. I started to encourage her.”

And Namen started to encourage others and that started a flow of communication with many people in the group.

“I started to put mountains in my life again,” he said. “My wife said to me, ‘That’s the Leo I know, that I want back.’”

Namen later learned that his dad, who he hadn’t seen since he was a child, previously had two heart attacks and has a pacemaker. That familial connection with heart disease helped explain why Namen, who did not smoke, drink or do drugs, had a heart attack.

“I didn’t know this until it almost killed me,” he said. “Being healthy doesn’t mean you can’t have a heart attack.” 

That knowledge leads to another of Namen’s goals: educating the public about heart disease.

“My realization was that my number one mission will be encouraging survivors that when you see that light in that tunnel shutting off, you can go yourself and turn those lights on. You have to do it yourself.”

He described that realization as an “Everest” of sorts.

“An ‘Everest’ is moving for ten minutes after you’ve had a stroke,” Namen said. “We all have Everests. We just have to go there.”

Summiting isn’t the first time Namen has stepped up to the plate to bring attention to a cause. In ‘Compassion Brian,’ he climbed Mount Columbia, between Jasper and Banff, to raise money to help a young boy with brain paralysis and his mother in Edmonton.

Six years ago, Namen took widows on a climb, ‘Fate Without Fear,’ in the Banff area to encourage them to move forward. Another time, in about 2007, he took people with drug addictions on a climb in the Banff area to show them about the challenges encountered.

In 2018, a couple of months before the heart attack, Namen climbed Pico de Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico, to draw attention to two orphanages scheduled for closure. They ended up being kept open and school supplies, “boxes and boxes of teddy bears” and more were taken there. Namen said a Canadian/Mexican organization is assisting the orphanages on an ongoing basis. He remembers experiencing a bit of chest pain during that adventure but passed it off as a minor discomfort.

The six-to-seven hours a day that Namen trains to prepare for the Everest summit is tough but rewarding for him.

“It’s been a full journey of exercise, diet, oxygen control. I’ve been training with masks. I have to take 11 pills a day.”

Namen reported good progress when it came to healing.

“According to my doctors, 99 per cent of my heart has recovered,” he said. “It’s even better now than when I was younger.”

For Namen, climbing a mountain is more than a physical effort.

“I bond with the mountain. I become part of the mountain.”

When he reaches a summit, there’s no celebratory yelling, jumping up and down. He’s in silence, quietly taking in the incredible feeling of being on top of the world. To support his Everest climb, visit heartofthesummit.ca.