voice but resisted going to the doctor.
He was living in New Mexico and checked in with his great-aunt Jannie McGoogan, Monique’s mother. “She heard my voice and she was like, ‘Are you still sick?'” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Boy, if you don’t get off that couch and take your behind to the hospital right now, I’m gonna fly out there and kick your tail!'”
He obeyed. Fans snapped photos of him being wheeled around. “I was completely bloated,” Quinton says. “My legs were swollen and sore all the time. It was just hard to breathe.”
The diagnosis was congestive heart failure.
Heart failure can have genetic roots, says Dr. Gregg Lanier, who has treated Quinton at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York. Quinton has such a history, plus risk factors such as sleep apnea and obesity.
Medications are crucial for controlling heart failure, he notes. But lifestyle changes can help.
Which is what Quinton set out to do. Eventually.
The year 2020 “was dreadful,” he shares. He was hospitalized once for COVID-19 and twice for heart failure. He tended to be “a nomad,” moving around for work, and took his medications sporadically.
But in late 2021, he learned he also had diabetes. “And I was like, enough is enough.”
His weight has gone up and down throughout his life. To get in shape for his “Blind Side” role, he’d dropped more than