IMS president’s race to save his son: ‘It was all scary’

INDIANAPOLIS — Doug Boles is in constant motion this month, delegating responsibilities, dealing with media and IndyCar fans and looking for ways to make the 101st Indianapolis 500 bigger and better. In his role as president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Boles is a people person. To watch him work at the race track is to watch a man in his element.

Boles was way out of his element when his son Carter was born with an accelerated heartbeat 14 years ago. Doctors couldn’t stop Carter’s heart from racing up to 320 beats per minute. Within hours, Carter was loaded into an ambulance and hurried away from his parents to a different hospital to be further evaluated by heart specialists. At that moment, Boles was not thinking about racing. Instead, his mind raced toward thoughts he wasn’t sure he could handle.

“It was sort of a smack in the face, that while you may think you’re in control of everything, you’re not,” Boles recalled. “My thought process of having a child had been like we were getting a puppy. I was like, ‘OK, Beth is going to have Carter, he’ll be home in a day, and we’ll figure out the babysitting arrangements.’

“Those six weeks he was in the hospital made me sit down. It made me realize that the most important thing you have in life is family, and you really aren’t in control. Every time I look at Carter, I’m thankful for the blessing I’ve been given.”

Carter’s heart condition never prevented his family from living in the fast lane. His brother, Indianapolis native and race car driver Conor Daly, will drive in the 500 for A.J. Foyt Racing. Carter’s mother, Beth Boles, is an accomplished jet ski racer. She previously was married to race car driver Derek Daly, and she has two other boys, Colin Daly and Christian Daly.

The family has even more to be thankful for lately. In February, Carter had a catheter ablation, a procedure that used radiofrequency energy to address his diagnosed condition, Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. The syndrome, which appears at birth, is an extra electrical pathway between the heart's upper and lower chambers, which causes a rapid heartbeat.

The procedure has been highly successful with Wolff-Parkinson-White patients, and in Carter’s case, things have gone extremely well. Carter, now an eighth-grader at Heritage Christian in Indianapolis, is playing lacrosse for the first time. Active and pain-free, able to run with no spells of irregular heartbeat or dizziness since the procedure, Carter is having a special spring leading up to the race his family loves so much.

“Running was always kind of a challenge for me, just because I was afraid that if I pushed myself too hard, it would develop into arrhythmia,” Carter said. “Running is so much easier, I actually like it. And I’m the fastest guy on my team.”

The bond is strong between Carter, the youngest boy, and his oldest brother Conor, the race car driver. Piloting a car traveling more than 200 mph doesn’t scare Conor Daly. But he admitted to being nervous about Carter’s heart procedure in February.

“It’s not like open-heart surgery, but it’s a serious procedure,” Daly said. “I haven’t really known anybody who’s had any heart surgery. Everyone was a little worried, but I’m a very positive person. He had really good doctors, but my mom was worried, Doug was worried. It’s cool to see it go well.” 

The long road to good health for Carter began when he was born with supraventricular tachycardia, which caused occasional episodes of arrhythmia. His Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome was not discovered until later. Even after Carter was well enough to come home after his birth, the first year of his life kept the Boleses awake many nights.

“It took them awhile to find the right meds,” Boles said. “He had to have a monitor the first year of his life everywhere we went. We’d get these warnings in the middle of the night, because his heartbeat was going down to 20 or 30 beats per minute. He was being overmedicated to make up for the electrical problem in his heart.”

Boles recalled one Christmas night when he had to rush Carter, then a toddler, to the hospital.  

“He started turning blue because he wasn’t getting the oxygen he needed,” Boles said. “He was throwing up in the backseat and I’m flying down the road.”

Carter’s more dramatic moments decreased as he got older, but he had to be cautious. Running could cause his heart to accelerate too much, and once that happened, Carter never knew whether it would take five minutes or hours for his heart to return to a normal rate.

Carter’s cardiologist, Dr. Leonard Steinberg, had been recommending the ablation procedure for a few years, but neither Carter nor his parents were immediately thrilled with the idea.

“Every procedure has potential risks,” Steinberg said. “This procedure was minimally invasive, but there are risks associated with a heart catheterization — stroke, heart attack, causing a heart block which would mean you’d need a pacemaker the rest of your life. There’s risk of poking a hole through the wall of the heart, and some other risks too. The risk of major complication is less than 1 percent, and If you look at any complication overall, the risk is about 3 or 4 percent.”

Once Carter also was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, the idea of having Carter proceed with the ablation became more appealing to Beth Bowles. Wolff-Parkinson-White patients have 1 percent chance of suffering a sudden death episode, and she wanted to eliminate that 1 percent.

“I had a lot of trepidation about Carter having the ablation, but he had a couple of pains in his heart not very long ago, before we decided to have the ablation,” Bowles said. “Maybe those pains were unrelated to the Wolff-Parkinson, but I didn’t like it. So do you risk this procedure he had in February, or do you risk getting a phone call one day? Meanwhile, Carter’s reading all this stuff and he’s worried. So we prayed about it, knowing His hand would be in it. We finally decided to do it. Now I look at him and see this complete kind of freedom. It’s beautiful. But yes, it was all scary.”

Those fears have been alleviated, with Carter feeling better than ever the past three months, and his prognosis extremely positive.

“Realistically when you come back three months after the ablation, and you’re not having any symptoms, and your WTW pattern is gone, you’re probably cured,” Steinberg said. “My practice is to see people a year out from an ablation procedure. A that point if they’re not having any more symptoms, then I kick them out of the cardiology monitoring. I think the likelihood for Carter is that he’s cured of this condition forever. I expect he’s going to have a normal lifespan, and normal quality of life, and this will never get in his way again.”

That sounds great to Carter, who hopes a political career is in his future. He got a taste of that May 2 when he and his father visited Vice President Mike Pence at the White House.

“That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done,” Carter said. “Just being able to walk in through the West Wing of the White House was really cool. The Marines standing there, opening the door for you. Walking into the vice president’s office. That was awesome.”

Doug Boles pulled some string to make the meeting with Pence happen. Being president of IMS has its perks.

“I’ve known the vice president before he was governor,” Boles said. “I let the vice president’s team know I was going to be in town, and would love to say hi if he had time. Twenty minutes later I got a note back saying the vice president would love to see you, we’ll figure it out. I told Beth to pack Carter’s suit, and we flew out together.”

Boles would love to end the month with a 500 that features great weather, an exciting finish, and a strong showing by Daly. As race day approaches, Boles has hundreds of things on his mind — sponsors, fans, weather reports, media obligations. IMS continues to fight for its place and relevancy in a sports market that has never been more competitive. The long-term future of IMS largely depends on how each Indianapolis 500 is received, and Boles feels the weight of that pressure.

But during difficult times, Boles sometimes reflects on what Carter has been through. He still remembers visiting Carter when he was one day old at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health. Boles spent the first night of Carter’s life with Beth at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital at St. Vincent, after Carter had been transported to Riley. Boles didn’t want to leave Beth alone, so other relatives went to see Carter, while Boles stayed with Beth.

The next morning, Boles drove to see his newborn and began feeling sorry himself. But those feelings changed when Boles saw his son lying next to other sick infants.

“You walk in, and there’s eight or nine other infants in there, and Carter is three or four times the size of some of these other babies,” Boles said. “Carter was overdue so he was a huge baby – 9 pounds, 11 ounces.  I took it as God’s way of saying 'Hey, your problem pales in comparison to other people’s. You have a full-term baby.’ Many of those births were premature, and all of those kids didn’t make it.

“You either look at life as woe is me, or you can look around at all the blessings you’ve got. If you look at all the blessings, you realize you really don’t have any problems. It’s not some kind of cancer, his organs aren’t shutting down. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in our struggles, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re pretty blessed.”

At one of Carter’s recent lacrosse games, he took a hard hit and went down to the ground. He got up, started running again, and finished the game.

Looking on from the sideline, Boles smiled.

Follow IndyStar reporter Clifton Brown on Twitter: @CliftonGBrown.