Keough misses start after husband's heart attack

SANDPOINT — Mike Keough, a longtime physical education teacher and high school golf coach, was stricken with a heart attack at his home Friday night.

Keough, 56, was at home when he felt symptoms and collapsed. He was taken to Bonner General Hospital by ambulance and flown to Kootenai Medical Center, where he underwent surgery. During the procedure, doctors implanted a stent into his heart to hold open an artery that had 95 percent blockage.

His wife, Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, and their two boys were at their Kootenai home when Mike Keough collapsed.

“He is doing well now and should be home tomorrow,” said Shawn Keough, who praised the efforts of the 911 emergency response, the EMS staff and the professionals at BGH Friday night. “The doctors are even telling us that he could be back at work in two weeks with a some rest and rehabilitation.”

Mike Keough had been suffering chest pains recently “and like everybody else had been shoveling tons of snow.”

Shawn Keough will miss the first week of the legislative session to stay home with her husband. She will stay in touch with her committee work through the Internet.

“We have a great legislative team from here in Boise so we won’t miss much by me being up here,” she said. “They will be keeping an eye on things for me.”

She watched Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter’s State of the State address Monday night on television and said, given the harsh economic times, it did not have a lot of good news about the state’s budget.

“As expected, the governor laid out the reality of the economic times we’re facing in Idaho, which comes as no surprise. He talked about how, as a state government, we will need to handle that,” she said.

Otter said the 2010 fiscal budget he submitted to the Legislature features a 7 percent cut from the state’s general fund. The budget recommends cuts of 5.3 percent from public education, 10 percent from higher education, 51 percent from the Department of Commerce and 56 percent from the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Shawn Keough said she will consider all of Otter’s proposals, but she wants to examine some of the cuts before committing to them.

“I want to take a hard look at the K-12 proposal. What I would like to do is have the leaders — the superintendents, the school boards, the teachers — have an opportunity to put together their suggestions about what they can and can’t do,” she said.