Four years ago, Mike and Ethel Marley were snorkelling in Barbados when Ethel noticed her husband couldn’t lift his head out of the water.
“He was grey and he couldn’t breathe properly, so I had to drag him out,” said Ethel, a retired critical-care nurse.
She got him to a doctor, who did an echocardiogram — a cardiac ultrasound — that revealed a leaky heart valve.
Once back in Victoria, Mike went to see cardiologist Dr. Karan Shetty, Island Health’s medical lead for echocardiography. He went through a battery of tests and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.
Last summer, he started retaining fluid and was admitted to Royal Jubilee Hospital, where he spent two weeks in the cardiac unit before returning home.
The problems continued, however, until one day he became unresponsive and Ethel had to call 911, which she says she had never had to do “in all my life as a nurse. It was very frightening.”
Mike was readmitted to hospital and found to have an irregular heartbeat. In October, he underwent a cardioversion, a procedure that shocks the heart in an effort to restore regular rhythm. Fortunately, it worked.
To date, Mike has had six echocardiograms — the most recent one on Thursday.
He said his experience is an example of what the health-care system can do. It has also helped him deal with Parkinson’s.
“They have done a remarkably good job,” he said. “I need them for the future, too.”
At 79, Jamaican-born Mike said with a laugh that he is coming to terms with the fact that his body parts are all past their “best-before date.”
Ethel also offered praise for the health-care system, which she said has been excellent despite the difficulties of working through a pandemic.
The Victoria Hospitals Foundation hopes to buy six echocardiogram machines as part of its ongoing Emerge Stronger fundraising campaign, and the Marleys hope their experience will show the importance of the machines.
“I definitely want to urge all the people to support this cause — it’s an exceptional system,” said Mike, a former developer who has sat on the boards of several charities.
Emerging Stronger aims to generate $10 million to fund more than 200 pieces of equipment, including the echocardiogram machines. Shetty, who has been at Royal Jubilee for seven and a half years, says the machines are much-needed.
At the beginning of the pandemic, he said, many elective echocardiograms were deferred or cancelled by referring physicians to keep their patients out of the hospital, which has increased wait times for echocardiograms across the Island. The waits have come down in recent months and will hopefully drop further with more equipment, Shetty said.
He described an echocardiogram as “an indispensable tool that provides cardiologists with lots of valuable information about the cardiac muscle and valves.”
Shetty said the machine emits high-frequency sound waves that bounce off the heart and the blood flowing through it. The returning sound waves are processed to generate images of the heart that help cardiologists understand its structure and function.
To donate to Emerge Stronger, go to or call 250-519-1750.
