JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon admitted that he has “PTSD” from a “near death” heart surgery, which he revealed was much more serious than the Wall Street titan let on when it took place in 2020.
“When I was being wheeled in the operating room for the dissection, I knew it was like 50/50,” 68-year-old Dimon said of the acute aortic dissection he suffered from four years ago, which the Mayo Clinic describes as “a serious condition in which a tear occurs in the inner layer of the body’s main artery.”
“Blood rushes through the tear, … [and] if the blood goes through the outside aortic wall, aortic dissection is often deadly,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
Even so, “I didn’t have any regrets,” Dimon told The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Tucker in a wide-ranging interview Thursday.
The one thing “maybe that changed a little bit” after the health crisis is that Dimon has a greater urge to “help this country and the free Western world.”
“That is on my mind,” added Dimon, who shares three daughters with his wife of more than four decades, Judith Kenth.
At the time of the surgery in question, JPMorgan didn’t comment much on its CEO’s health, only informing employees and shareholders after the procedure “that Jamie experienced an acute aortic dissection this morning.”
“He underwent successful emergency heart surgery to repair the dissection. The good news is that it was caught early and the surgery was successful. He is awake, alert and recovering well,” then-JPMorgan co-presidents Daniel Pinto and Gordon Smith wrote back in March 2020.
Six years prior, Dimon also beat throat cancer.
When asked by Tucker on Thursday about how his experience with a “big cancer scare” changed him, Dimon began by swiftly correcting the journalist: “The cancer scare was cancer.”
He went on to say the diagnosis made him “try to live life a little more deliberately.”
“I love my job, I love my family, I love all those things, so nothing really changed that way, but it is a little more deliberate,” Dimon added of his experience with cancer which, at the time of his diagnosis in 2014, was deemed unspecified but “curable.”
After beating the cancer later that same year, Dimon relayed a similar sentiment during his first public appearance in New York since finishing his treatments the month prior, telling an industry conference: “I still want to make it a better world. I think when I’m done with this, I’m going to do it more directly.”
During his recovery, which consisted of weeks-long rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, Dimon assured JPMorgan’s investors that he didn’t expect to skip work while getting treatment.
Though smoking, drinking hard alcohol and human papillomavirus are the main causes of most types of throat cancer, Dimon had reportedly never bought a pack of smokes in his life.
Since the early ’80s, Dimon — who rose to the top job at JPMorgan in 2006 — has notoriously opted for aerobics, regular jogs and 5:30 am visits to the gym.
Representatives for JPMorgan did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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