it’s been a tough few weeks for small fleet owner Bryon Stoll of New London, Wisconsin. In today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Stoll recounts the myriad things that went just right on his evening trip to the hospital for what turned out to be emergency surgery to clear a near total blockage of a coronary artery, the reason for the heart attack the 48-year-old longtime truck owner and operator was experiencing.

Stoll, with his wife, Holly, heads up reefer carrier Surprise Trucking, who we reported on at length earlier this week attendant to Suprise's semifinalist recognition as part of Overdrive 2022 Small Fleet Championship: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15115044/suprise-truckings-long-road-to-resurrection

It’s a more dead-serious topic that dominates Stoll’s story today, though. If you don’t have your life, of course, the day-to-day concerns of a trucking business are but a luxury you’ll never afford.

The Stolls know that in a very intimate way after Bryon's experience. A lot went wrong the fateful evening of his heart attack, as he tells it. (His past time as a firefighter and emergency medical technician himself led him to recognize a breakdown in communication between initial emergency dispatch and the ambulance crew that showed up at his home after his wife’s call, for instance.)

Yet for everything that went wrong, there was something else that came off just perfectly -- the team of EMTs that did arrive knew just what they were dealing with, and went the extra mile for his life. The Stolls are thankful on that score, no doubt, as are we. Bryon told his story as something of a cautionary tale for any of us listening, particularly those with heart attack risk factors, including a family history of heart ailments.