Long-time road race tire vendor Jim “Moose” Kuykendall is currently recovering in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Missions Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina following a heart attack on Monday, August 24 and triple heart bypass surgery yesterday. “Moose thought he had hurt his right shoulder at the WERA event at VIR (August 7-9),” Theresa Kuykendall, Moose’s wife wrote in an e-mail to Roadracingworld.com. “He dealt with the pain. Then his sister had a heart attack Friday, August 14 when we were at VIR for the AMA races. “She was able to have three stents and home healing, so I guess Moose just didn’t worry with his pain. And with all our stress he doesn’t like to make me worry. “So after we got back from VIR he worked and even took a nice ride this past Saturday on his motorcycle. But on Sunday he hurt enough to say he would go to the doctor on Monday. We called our doctor, and he said if he was having any chest issues he needed to go straight to emergency room. “So after working all day Monday I finally got him to go to the emergency room. When they were checking him in and taking his blood pressure I noticed that the bottom number didn’t look right, 120! “They rushed him in, started an EKG and within five minutes had about eight people working on him. I asked what was wrong, and they said he was having a heart attack and apparently had already had one at another time! “They got him stable and transported to the hospital in Asheville. We had hoped that once they had a catheter done that they could fix it with stents, but the doctor said he would have to have surgery, a quadruple or triple bypass. He said the main artery was 95% blocked and damaged and that two or three others were blocked. “Surgery started around 11:00 a.m. Thursday. I got hourly updates, and around 2:00 p.m. the doctor told me Moose did good, his heart looked good and he did do a triple bypass. “Three hours later I finally got to see him for five minutes, then I got to see him again two hours later for another five minutes and he was awake a little and spoke to me and wanted to get up! He knows the trick to get out of a hospital! Then when I went back for the last ICU visit of the night at 8:30 p.m. he was sitting up in a chair with about a million tubes everywhere! That’s my Moose!! “Hopefully, he will be out of ICU by Saturday and then out of the hospital in about five to seven days. But knowing my Moose he will do whatever it takes to get out of there ASAP! I’ll keep you posted.”