Promoter of Jobless Suffers Heart Attack, Inspired by Second Chance

Transported by the River Edge Volunteer Ambulance Corps to Hackensack Hospital to save your life at 4 a.m. after suffering a heart attack...Free.
 
Cost of fatty and high sodium foods now gone from your life...$0.

Monthly cost of medications to keep your heart beating properly...$160.  

Six days at the hospital, two stents in your heart to help keep you alive... $171,569.44. 

The love and best wishes showered on you by hundreds of friends and family members...Priceless.

--John Fugazzie, Founder of Neighbors-helping-Neighbors, following his heart attack.

His silence was almost as crushing as the words that followed. 

"I just opened a bill from the hospital for $171,569.44," John Fugazzie said in a voice that hovered somewhere between astonished and baffled. "How can I ever pay that kind of money?" he asked incredulously.

Fugazzie founded Neighbors-helping-Neighbors, a job search support and networking group targeted to individuals who are actively looking for work, in January 2011. And like those he counsels, he has no job and cannot afford the high monthly premium of health insurance on the open market for him and his family.

He lost his job, his home and, like so many people today, he has returned to live in the house where he was raised--in River Edge. He, along with thousands of others, is desperately seeking employment, but cannot get a bite or a break. 

"Most of us who are unemployed are in our 50's and 60's," Fugazzie said. "The victims of a bad economy."

"We have experience, commitment and loyalty, but still...nobody seems to want to hire us."

The oldest of four, Fugazzie was 15 when his mother woke him in the middle of the night to tell him she could not wake his father. Sure enough, at the age of 45, his father had suffered a heart attack in his sleep. 

"That number, that age--45--haunted me until I passed it," Fugazzie said. 

But lying in the bed in the room he grew up in, the same room he was sleeping in the night his father had died, a burning pain radiating across his entire back, sweating profusely, he wondered if the fate of his father was descending upon him.  

On the brutally hot evening of July 18, Fugazzie walked the mile to the River Edge Library from his boyhood home to host a Neighbors-helping-Neighbors meeting. 

"I felt fine walking until the last two blocks," Fugazzie said. "That's when I felt something was wrong, but I couldn't explain exactly what it was."

Feeling better once inside the air-conditioned library, Fugazzie decided to walk home only to be overcome by the same strangeness. He chalked it up to doing too much yardwork in the heat earlier that day and went to bed only to have extreme pain wake him at 4 a.m. 

"I didn't have the typical arm-chest pain symptoms associated with a heart attack," Fugazzie said. "I had a burning sensation that radiated across my entire back."

When his son came into the room and saw him in pain and sweating profusely, he immediately called for help. 

According to Fugazzie, within minutes of his son dialing 911, the River Edge police arrived, immediately followed by the River Edge Ambulance Corps and paramedics. 

"The police and ambulance were outstanding," Fugazzie said. "Words can't express how great they really were to me." 

Upon arriving at Hackensack University Medical Center, Fugazzie learned that one of his main arteries was 100 percent blocked, the other 80 percent blocked. He was rushed into the operating room to clear the first artery and returned a few days later to clear the second. 

"I'm lucky to be alive," Fugazzie said. "Clearly, my work here is not yet complete."

And every knock to the ground, Fugazzie says, brings him closer to those people he encounters every day who he is trying to help. 

"I always knew the value of having an employer health insurance plan," Fugazzie said. "But until you face a crisis, you can never really appreciate it."

"$171,000 is what it cost to save my life," he said. "A small price, really, but when you have nothing, you don't even know where to begin."

Which is why Fugazzie said he is more determined than ever to bring greater awareness to Neighbors-helping-Neighbors and the growing ranks of unemployed and under-employed people the group serves every day.

Because of his work with Neighbors-helping-Neighbors, Fugazzie took part in the 2012 White House Forum, Job Clubs and Career Ministries: On the Front Lines of Getting Americans Back to Work. He has also been invited back to Washington for the swearing-in of Tom Perez as the Secretary of Labor in September. 

"I am inspired more than ever to bring awareness to this group and to the plight of people who are unemployed," Fugazzie said. "I was given a second chance at life, so I know that my job is not done. In fact, it's only beginning."

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