Cameron Herold collapsed in a Seattle elevator during a nervous breakdown in 2000. A doctor's risk assessment scored him 435 points, indicating a 90% chance of heart attack, far above the 250-point danger threshold. He ignored it at first, then realized executives must listen to their bodies or burnout becomes deadly.
Chapters
October of 2000, I was standing in an elevator in Seattle. I just prepared to move back to Canada, and one of my VPs tapped me on the shoulder and he said, are you okay? I weighed 30-odd pounds heavier than I do today. I was smoking, I was drinking a lot, I wasn't eating very well, I certainly wasn't getting exercise. I'd never been to the gym. I turned around to say, yeah, I'm totally fine, and I collapsed on the floor of the elevator and started sobbing. I was having a full nervous breakdown, and no, I wasn't okay. I was a fucking train wreck. As you would do back in those days, I just went for dinner that night and had my steaks and red wine grinding Grand Marnier and Manhattans, and that's how I got through the night. And then I woke up the next day and was back in the office at 7:00 grinding. A week later, I went to the doctor's office. The doctor said, "How's it going?" I'm like, "It's pretty good. I have this weird kind of a metallic taste at the back of my neck." So the doctor did a test, and he gave me a series of questions, and each question had some points attached to them. And if you get 250 points, you have a 90% chance of a heart attack. I had 435 points. I was clinically redlining, which is why I'd had the nervous breakdown the week before. But instead of me going, oh, there's something wrong, I should maybe go seek help, I did what most guys do, which is, oh, that was fucking weird. Let's go have a drink and some smokes and have a couple of good steaks and I'll be fine, right? The lesson that I got was to listen to my body more. And the whole Latin phrase of mens sana in corpore sano, the healthy mind in a healthy body, I had to start getting my shit together.
