An unusual chest-pain moment was all it took. A medical laboratory technologist with knowledge of health care issues, Mark Murphy reacted to an ache shooting to his neck and jaw last month by dialing for the help of a friend. She drove an hour to him—then another hour to the hospital where Mark was admitted and placed on a heart pump. He is home recovering from triple-bypass surgery.

I am requesting money for Mark, a friend for 10 years, for recovery-specific costs. The big one is hiring a dog walker until he can resume normal activities, probably at least two weeks from now. He is 68 and lives alone. He is on doctors’ orders not to walk either of his two large dogs, owing to a surgical wound from just below the neck on down.

His dogs are Maggie Mae, a 107-pound Newfoundland raised from a puppy, and a Labrador mix named Mycroft “Mike.” I will turn all donations over to Mark to defray the cost of contracting likely through rover.com for an individual to walk the dogs daily.

Mark is a U.S. Navy veteran who worked in a naval laboratory, then in the private sector, before transitioning to the insurance business. He said lives off Social Security, plus a check for partial disability from the Veterans Administration, and is without retirement savings. He intends to return to the insurance business after recovery.

Mark is best known among friends for his compassionate, loving heart. He participates in the ManKind Project and Whatever It Takes.

This is not his first brush with pain or loss. When he was stricken, Mark was still grieving the death of his wife Cheryl to cancer 10 days short of a year prior. She was 61.

“This has been a very interesting year of my life,” Mark said. “You know like the curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ ”