With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/383533
82 BCBusiness oCtoBer 2014 Several months later, following medical tests in Vancouver, doctors determined that Labou had suffered a heart attack. Only 42 at the time, with a wife and three boys, there was no apparent genetic reason for the cardiac arrest; Labou's parents were hale and hearty heading into their 80s. Yet two main arteries were 95 per cent blocked: the right coronary artery, which pro- vides blood to the right side of the heart, and the left anterior descend- ing, which supplies blood to the left side. Labou ended up having an angio- plasty in hospital to remove the block- ages and two stents were inserted to keep the arteries open. That was on a Thursday. By Mon- day, Labou was back at work. "If I didn't work my income would drop signifi- cantly," he says by way of reason. But t here were also corporate expecta- tions: "You didn't just leave because you were sick; you didn't take time off," Labou says. Today—slender, dressed in a beige jacket and cream-coloured shirt, with light brown hair and tanned skin— Labou, 55, is the picture of health. How- ever, to use an unfortunate cliché, his heart is a ticking time bomb. He recalls, while supine in his hospital bed, a grim conversation with his cardiologist. If he were to have another heart attack, the doctor told him, Labou had a one in five chance of survival. How did Labou's health spin so badly out of control at such a young age? The evidence pointed to lifestyle: his high-level marketing and sales job meant restaurant lunches up to four times a week—Labou's guilty pleasure was french fries—as well as several din- ners out. Friday afternoons with clients might be whiled away with "five or six double Grand Mar- niers" to launch an evening of food and wine. Being back in the office the next morning by 7:30 sharp often meant L abou was a lso short on sleep. There were no clear warning signs of a pending cardiac arrest. OK, maybe Labou had gone a bit soft: his waist was 34 inches, up from 32 inches, and he was packing an extra 15 pounds. But he was active, c o a c h i n g k i d s ' sports teams and working with a per- sonal trainer. Peer- ing back at his life through the lens of hindsight, however, "so much of it was wrong," Labou says. Labou isn't an anomaly: everyone has at least one corporate comrade who has ended up in hospital with a tetchy ticker. But hospitalization is the extreme. More commonly, men develop one or more of a raft of lifestyle-related ailments—low testosterone, erectile dysfunction, Type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, depression, osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease—that quietly but insidiously dominate their personal life, and which they try to hide from the workplace. All these conditions are influenced by diet, alcohol intake, sleep, exercise, smoking and stress lev- els. But who has time to exercise and eat right when you're commuting to the office, conducting business over lunch or dinner then scurrying home to help tuck the kids into bed? As Labou says: "You create your best relationships not on business time but personal time. To establish a great relationship with somebody that will translate to busi- ness being put your way, you do that over drinks and dinners and spending the weekend together, which in the end creates more profit for the company." today–slender, dressed in a beige jacket and cream- coloured shirt, with light brown hair and tanned skin–Labou, 55, is the picture of health. how- ever, to use an unfortunate cliché, his heart is a ticking time bomb. he recalls a grim conversation with his cardiologist. if he were to have another heart attack, the doctor told him, Labou had a one in five chance of survival One afternoon, Labou took a break from hobnobbing to go for a walk along the shoreline. Temperatures in Cancun hover around 30 C, but the sand—so white it reflects rather than absorbs the sun—is almost cool on your feet. This day, however, the beach felt like quick- sand. "I was having a hard time and had to stop and lie down," recalls Labou. "I passed out. When I came to I walked the rest of the way back and sat down on a lounge chair and had a drink."