By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

LADY LUCK was watching over Dundee man David Easton when he had a heart attack waiting for his wife Margaret in the car park at King’s Cross Hospital.

Mr Easton was sitting alone in his vehicle when he became ill while Margaret attended a physiotherapy appointment in the new health and community care centre.

When she came out and found her husband slumped in his seat, she ran back into the centre, appealing for help.

A team of dentists, who had just moved in to a new dental suite in the £4 million centre the previous week, rushed outside to assist.

They grabbed a never-before-used emergency kit, kept in the new therapies centre, and gave Mr Easton oxygen and applied their life support training while waiting for the ambulance.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” Mr Easton said yesterday when he returned to King’s Cross to plant a tree to commemorate the NHS 60th anniversary.

Only three weeks after his heart attack, he was full of praise for all of the people who helped him to survive, from those who answered his wife’s initial call for help, to the ambulance staff and the medical team at Ninewells Hospital.

“I can’t thank everybody enough. I don’t even know who they were.”

His treatment at Ninewells involved a procedure known as angioplasty that involves feeding a balloon into the arteries and inflating it to expand narrowed blood vessels that can cause a heart attack.

The procedure is an alternative to a coronary artery bypass and specialists in Dundee have only recently started performing angioplasty while patients are having a heart attack.

If Mr Easton had his heart attack in Dundee this time last year, he would have had to go to Edinburgh for an angioplasty.

Once again, he stressed he was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. But it was Mrs Easton who was able to emphasise the speed and quality of help her husband received.

“The ambulance came to King’s Cross and they gave him treatment and were able to tell him he was having a heart attack,” she said.

“Within an hour and a half he was in the coronary care unit at Ninewells and getting angioplasty. He was out and home in two days. They said in Ninewells he has been really lucky because there doesn’t appear to be any damage done to the heart. It just emphasises the importance of getting treatment immediately.”

She said the fact her husband was back home and planning a trip to Florida just three weeks after having a heart attack, emphasised the progress the NHS has made over the last six decades.

“Years ago he would have been in bed for weeks if he survived a heart attack,” said Mrs Easton, who was a nursing auxiliary in local hospitals including Ninewells before retirement.

Mr Easton was getting up out of his hospital bed the day after his heart attack and back home the day after that. The only concession to his brush with death is he has to let Margaret drive him around.