State lawmaker recovering at home after heart attack

State Sen. Steve Johnson is thin, doesn't smoke and is a healthy eater.

So when he felt the classic symptoms of a heart attack Tuesday morning, at first he thought he would wait for them to pass.

"I was sitting in bed, and I was like, 'I feel kind of bad,'" he said from his home Thursday. When he got up, it was worse, and he started gasping for air.

"I thought, 'This doesn't seem logical to me at all,'" he said.

After waiting a few minutes, he decided to go to the emergency room.

Johnson, 47, a Republican from Fort Collins, said he feels better now than he did before his heart attack.

Doctors at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins inserted a stent to improve blood flow, and Johnson said it helped immensely. The clogging was on the side of the heart that pumps blood into the lungs.

"I just instantly could breathe again," Johnson said.

The heart muscle will repair itself with plenty of rest and care. Within a few months, "I should be better than before," he said.

Johnson has a few family members with a history of heart problems, but he's never smoked and has a healthy diet -- factors that should make him much less likely to have a heart attack.

But you never know, he said.

Johnson is in his second term in the state Senate and sits on the powerful legislative Joint Budget Committee. A veterinarian by trade, he teaches an organic chemistry class at Colorado State University and even holds a part-time gig at Bath and Body Works -- just so, he jokes, he can get his wife a discount.

He plans to be back in the classroom this morning, with one extra lesson in mind:

"My words of wisdom are to know the signs of it, and if you know the signs, get to the ER immediately. It's better to go there and be wrong than not to go," he said. "It can happen in a younger person, it can happen to a skinnier person, so don't assume that it can't happen to you."