BILLINGS — Kenneth "Griz" Taylor has been passionate about motorcycles for as long as he can remember.
But an incident in April put his exciting lifestyle on hold for weeks after he received treatment at the Billings Clinic ICU.
Taylor is now back to full health, and he wants to thank the hospital for helping him return to his thrilling life on the road.
Learn more about the life-saving machine that kept Taylor alive after his heart attack in the video below:
Taylor is a former Harley-Davidson mechanic who's been riding motorcycles since the 1970s.
"I've been riding motorcycles all my life, since I was a little kid," Taylor said Thursday.
He's a part of the "Knuckles Up" motorcycle club in Billings. Taylor says the group of motorcyclists is one of the reasons he's still alive today.
"It is truly a brotherhood. And I didn't realize how much of a brotherhood it was until I had this heart attack," he said.
On April 10, Taylor was out riding with one of his club friends. The two stopped at another club member's house, when Taylor noticed he wasn't feeling great. The homeowner, a heart attack survivor, noticed the symptoms and gave Taylor two Aspirin tablets.
Taylor told MTN his motorcycle friends saved his life that day.
"It felt like an elephant fell on my chest," he said. "I remember walking in (the emergency room), and the lady said, 'What are you here for?' And I said, 'Ma'am, my chest really hurts.' And I woke up six days later."
Taylor was originally admitted into an outside hospital. Because of the severity of his heart attack, the hospital staff were going to fly him by emergency helicopter to Denver for treatment. However, he ended up getting transferred to Billings Clinic because of a special piece of life-saving equipment.
"I'm so thankful that they transported me, and not out of state," Taylor said.
"Once he was here, he got a stent to the left anterior descending artery, the Widowmaker artery, and that was enough to kind of restore blood flow to the heart, to help it work more efficiently," said Dr. Eric Howell, a heart surgeon and the chair of the cardiovascular and thoracic surgery department at Billings Clinic.
Taylor survived the heart attack and surgery, in part, thanks to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, or an ECMO machine, according to Howell.
An ECMO machine is a last-resort piece of equipment that hospital staff use during respiratory or cardiac failure when standard therapy fails, Howell explained.
Billings Clinic has been using ECMO machines since 2017, but in 2024, it received a grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust to expand mobile ECMO training. Since 2017, Billings Clinic has saved the lives of 83 patients, and has used the machine 13 times this year.
"We do a lot of this type of procedure here, because we are the referring hospital for the region. We're the only hospital within the region that provides ECMO mobile services," Howell said on Thursday.
The ECMO pumps blood and inflates the lungs artificially to keep severely injured patients alive during surgery.
A Billings Clinic cardiovascular perfusionist, Brian Reeder, said not only does an ECMO keep the patient alive, but it also will warm or cool the patient from within (through their blood), and it can do lab work from inside the operating room.
"It has... an artificial lung, and that way we can give oxygen and blow off CO2 while providing blood flow to the patient," he said. "Basically what we want to do is get a blood flow, so that we can support either the heart or the lungs, or both."
Taylor is now two months post-surgery. He said he's grateful that he survived the experience, that his motorcycle club supported him throughout his journey, and that Billings Clinic was able to provide services in his home state.
"I've got a second chance at life, and I want to take that opportunity to use it to the fullest," he said.
"I told him when he came back for his post-operative visit that, you know, occasionally in your career, you meet people who are walking miracles. And Mr. Taylor is as close to a walking miracle as I've encountered," said Howell.
