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Smith recovering from heart attack, still coming to Northern FanCon

There was a real-life comic book battle inside Kevin Smith's body and the hero destroyed the villain.
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FILE - In a Saturday, July 9, 2016 file photo, Kevin Smith arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of "Ghostbusters" at the TCL Chinese Theatre. The actor-director Kevin Smith says he had a “massive” heart attack after performing at a Los Angeles comedy show Sunday night, Feb. 25, 2018. Early Monday morning, Smith said on Twitter that if he hadn’t canceled his second show Sunday and gone to the hospital, he would have died.(Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

There was a real-life comic book battle inside Kevin Smith's body and the hero destroyed the villain. The bad guy was his totally blocked left anterior descending artery and his Justice League was the cardiology team at Glendale Adventist Hospital in California.

That's the colourful way of drawing it. The flat way of explaining it is Smith - the film star, celebrated movie director, and host of the podcast Fatman On Batman - had a massive heart attack and managed to survive thanks to modern medicine.

He is still the official headline guest for Northern FanCon coming up in May at CN Centre where he will broadcast a live episode of his podcast and have a very interesting story to tell of his body's rebellion and how it was vanquished.

"Dr. (Marc) Ladenheim...oh, that guy," said Smith in a Facebook Live monologue from his hospital room on Tuesday morning. "This guy's the Batman of fk-ing cardiologists, man. He was so calm. He was like a vigilante. He seized that LAD and he was like 'c'mere Joker' and he stuffed him in fk-ing Arkham (the fictitious prison asylum in Batman comics). These are comic book terms for people who don't understand medicine."

In his video post, Smith explained how he had finished one of two shows he was scheduled to perform for a live audience on Sunday night. In between events he began to feel nauseous, sweat profusely, and couldn't catch his breath. There was no pain and he remained mostly lucid. He was in the process of convincing himself it was food poisoning when the ambulance got called and in short, frantic order it became clear to the paramedics what was really happening.

His mother has two stents in her heart, his father died of a heart attack, but because he was only 47 years old with a recent history of healthy living, the notion of heart attack never crossed his mind, he said, until the hospital staff made him know that this was what was happening.

His artery was 100 per cent blocked.

A stent (an insert in the artery to ensure it doesn't close again) was inserted immediately and he woke up to the effects of blood flow the likes of which his body hadn't enjoyed for years. He was feeling incredibly well. He said he was barred from driving for a while, he would have to take a careful regimen of medications, and he had to convalesce for a week.

The only work he missed was that second live show Sunday night and an appointment to direct an episode of The Goldbergs.

The outpouring of support that flooded in by mail, social media and flowers delivered to his hospital room gave his heart quite the opposite of an attack.

"It was like reading your eulogy. I saw what the reaction would be like if I died, and it was very sweet," he said, repeatedly thanking family, friends and fans for their shows of support.

"I was always afraid of being terrified of dying," he said. "I've seen people die. I like life. Life worked out for me and I don't ever want to let it go. But in that moment, I was like...that'll do it. 'That'll do, pig, that'll do.' I felt like I was (cartoon piglet) Babe. I was ready, and I was ok with it."

He repeated that he felt very well and he would be back to normal activities as soon as he possibly could, with the added bonus of mortal gratitude.

Northern FanCon organizer Norm Coyne confirmed that no dates on Smith's schedule of public appearances had been cancelled even for the first week of March, let along the 70-or-so days until the Prince George show. That's more than two months for local fans to come to terms with their own feelings over such a near miss by a beloved artist.