Gentle grateful for support

County commissioner recovering from heart attack, surgery

NEWPORT — Pend Oreille County commissioner John Gentle made a somewhat surprise in-person appearance at the county commissioner meeting Monday, April 28, following his heart attack and subsequent triple bypass surgery.

He suffered the heart attack April 11, he said on a YouTube video of the meeting posted to Norm Smith’s Pend Oreille Political Circus Facebook page. Gentle had been on a leave of absence following the heart attack.

“I worked myself into a heart attack,” he told fellow commissioners Brian Smiley and Robert Rosencrantz and Human Resource Director Brenda Miller at the meeting. He said he was alone at the time. When his wife, Kim Gentle, returned home she drove him to Newport Hospital and Health Services. “They said, yeah you did in fact suffer a heart attack.”

He said he was transported to Spokane.

“I got to try out our ALS services firsthand,” he said.

Once in Spokane, he eventually had open heart surgery at Deaconess Hospital.

“They let me go home on Easter,” he said.

He told commissioners at the April 28 meeting that he wanted to keep up with his county commission work, but in a non-voting capacity until he knew more about his recovery time.

For now, vice chair Smiley serves as acting chair. The county commission has a quorum with two commissioners.

Monday, May 14, he told The Miner that there wasn’t much more to report. He wrote that he appreciated the support he received from Pend Oreille County people.

“I would be remiss if I didn’t say how moving it was to have so many people reach out and offer help for me and my family,” he texted. “Don’t know that I’d have that in the city!”

Gentle said in the April 28 video that he had been a long-time smoker.

“Some of it was predictable when you smoke for three decades,” he said.

He joked about the absence of a beard. “You can see without my beard that I’m just a kid, just a baby,” he said.

“You know it’s serious when John doesn’t have his beard,” Smiley laughed.

“There’s a little funny story on that one, Brian, because my nurse joked with me the night before,” Gentle said. “She was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do without your beard.’” The next day following his surgery the nurse saw him again. He hadn’t been told the beard was going to be shaved and neither had she.

“She was like, ‘No, I was just kidding, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to joke about something like that,’” Gentle said.

He said the long beard had to be removed because of the surgery involved. His chest was cut open. It also involved taking a vein out of his leg to fix the heart.

Monday when he texted The Miner, he said he had had the beard about eight years or so and will likely grow another one.

“I think I will grow the beard back,” he wrote. “It’s hard for me to imagine having a bare face during hunting season.”

Gentle told The Miner that he was grateful to have survived the heart attack.

“I know I dodged a bullet,” he wrote. “And these things have a way of distilling what really matters, you know?”