Announcer George Gray Survives 3 'Widow Maker' Heart Attacks

George Gray, the announcer on CBS' "The Price Is Right" actually told a cardiac surgeon to come on down Friday – to perform a quadruple bypass operation after he suffered multiple heart attacks days earlier.

Gray's wife, Brittney, told USAToday that he woke up Monday with what he thought was indigestion but it progressed to severe chest pain and weakness in his arms.

"If this isn't a heart attack, I don't know what it is," he told her.

The paramedics arrived a few minutes later to their place in Tucson, Arizona, where he's been staying during the production hiatus forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, "and hooked him up to an EKG "and then just looked at each other and went, 'Yep' " she recalled.

"Are you allowed to tell me I'm having a heart attack?" George asked.   "Yeah," they confirmed. "It's a big one."

Due to restrictions on visitors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Brittney wasn't allowed to accompany him to the hospital's catheter lab, where they attempted to install a stent in his left anterior descending artery, which the largest of the three arteries supplying blood to the heart.

"It was 100% blocked," Brittney said, adding that a second artery was 60% blocked.

George Gray

Minutes later, the stent failed, filling with plaque after the doctor left the cath lab.

"He basically had a second heart attack right there," she said. "The doctors were luckily able to rush back in and stent the stent."

In the recovery room, the doctors told George that he would need bypass surgery and an operation was scheduled for Friday.

"He recovered and he was getting stronger, but as he was being wheeled into the operating room, he started having a heart attack right on the operating table," Brittney recalled in an interview from outside his hospital room Saturday evening.

Attempting to calm him, the anesthesiologist fibbed and said he was just giving George some oxygen. "But they actually knocked him out and hurried to get him open," she said. "And instead of just one bypass, they did a quadruple bypass."

Gray, who just turned 53 in March, was not an obvious candidate for a heart attack, either, she said. "He has low cholesterol. He ran a mile the day before. No blood pressure problems, nothing. The doctor said this is most likely genetic. There are no signs beforehand – until the heart attack."

He is one of the 3% of U.S. men and 2% of U.S. women who have heart attacks between ages 40 and 59, according to the American Heart Association.