Joe’s Army turns out to battle heart disease

PALMER — Joe Hebert is the kind of guy a lot of people feel lucky to have known.

“If you read anything that anyone has written on his Facebook page, everybody misses his hugs,” said his cousin, Amanda Hebert. “He accepted everybody for who they were, no judgment.”

Which might explain why the team raising money in his name — Joe’s Army — is currently way out in front in fundraising for the Alaska Heart Run, scheduled for April 27 in Anchorage. Right now, the group is sitting at $9,700 raised.

“Our goal was $8,888.88 because 8 was Joseph’s favorite number, so that’s what our goal was. Well, we’ve passed it,” said his mother, Sherron Hebert. “Now our goal is $10,000.”

The next closest team has raised just over $1,000.

Amanda Hebert said it actually hasn’t been that hard.

“Not with the amazing social media,” she said.

Friends and family of Joe had already been connected through a Facebook page the family set up when he was in treatment for his heart condition.

“Joe’s group of friends are amazing and they just want to keep him alive, keep his memory alive,” she said. And the family feels the same. “Mostly, we’ve got right now, we’ve got 91 people on our team and most of them are connected to the family somehow.”

Joe Hebert was born and raised in the Valley. He was a Palmer High School graduate. After college, he came back to the state and was working on the North Slope for Nabors Drilling when, at age 32, he woke up one day with his heart just beating out of his chest.

Sherron Hebert said her husband had heart a heart problem — a leaky valve or, in more medical terms, a mitral valve prolapse — and doctors had said they were likely congenital. Joe Hebert was scheduled for an appointment to check his heart that day his heart started beating fast on the Slope. It’s a story Amanda Hebert knows as well.

“One of the guys he was working with felt his chest and said, ‘that’s not normal, bro,’” she said.

When he got it checked on the Slope, his mother said he was told he needed to get to a hospital quick. So he was medevaced to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.

“Being that he was 30 years younger than his dad, we thought this will not be a big deal,” Sherron Hebert said.

They were wrong. A three-hour surgery turned to a six-hour surgery.

“The next day on the 24th, they told us he was the sickest man in the state of Alaska at that point in time,” she said.

They needed to get him out of there. So he was medevaced to Spokane, Wash.

“I was on a little jet, they had a helium balloon inside of his body that was cradling his heart,” Sherron Hebert said. “They pushed us into this little jet and they lost him on that flight and they manually bagged him for two hours, and when we landed in Spokane the fire department was waiting for us.”

Joe needed two new valves in his heart. Then his other organs started going. His liver crashed, as well as his pancreas and kidneys.

“They never did come back online,” Sherron Hebert said. “He spent 148 days in the cardiac intensive care unit before he died.”

She said they put in a mechanical heart and found he had a tear in his aorta and in his tricuspid.

They fixed one, replaced another.

“They were trying desperately to find ways to keep him alive,” she said. “The heart actually started to work, but the other organs did not. After 148 days he just passed away, he just couldn’t do it anymore.”

It was toward the end that she called in the troops.

“I put out the word that if they wanted to come see him they had to come now,” she said. “It felt like an army was just trooping through the intensive care unit.”

That army became Joe’s Army.

“It’s a devastating loss for all of us,” Sherron Hebert said, adding the Alaska Heart Run “is our way of being able to do something.”

She and her niece agreed — mostly they just want people to know that heart disease isn’t just for old people.

“You wouldn’t have looked at him and thought you have heart issues,” Amanda Hebert said. “He was a healthy 33-year-old guy.”

Sherron Hebert agreed. “He was an oilfield worker, he was in great shape.”

But there were signs he either ignored or didn’t recognize. In college, she said, he’d sometimes faint in the shower if the water was too hot. He seemed often to be fighting a pernicious cold. Turns out, he’d had an infection surrounding his heart when he was younger. The infection went more-or-less dormant until they opened his chest to fix his leaky valve.

“It just attacked everything in his body,” Sherron Hebert said.

Amanda Hebert said after talking with Joe’s family they decided the Alaska Heart Run was a great way to memorialize him. “I think the way his sister put it is if we can prevent one other family from going through this same thing by going on this walk, then great.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.