Pianist George DeQuattro recalled years later, "I saw him about a week before he passed away. Vince seemed really fine. But he had seen a doctor because he had stomach problems, and was feeling ill and tired. The doctor told him it might just be ulcers, and prescribed some dumb medicine and told him to forget about it. But it wasn't that, and it's really a shame. That would never happen today." In his 2012 biography, "Vince Guaraldi at the Piano", author Derrick Bang wrote, "as time passed, Guaraldi's friends, family and colleagues would begin to wonder if a stomach aneurysm—or something else—had played a role in that heart attack," adding that Guaraldi's "complaint of a painful stomach ache clearly hadn't been taken seriously enough."