Have I got a story to tell you…

On December 5, 2023 my heart stopped beating

I wasn’t breathing, I had no pulse.  

I was dead.  Then I wasn’t.

That day I was at work chaperoning the two students I was assigned to get to and from lunch at school (new job, yay me!),dropped them off in the classroom and headed to check in with my teacher to tell her I was taking lunch and the next thing I remember was being loaded into the back of an ambulance headed to the hospital.

As I was being loaded into that ambulance I remembered a firefighter or a paramedic looking in my face and saying “HEY WELCOME BACK BUDDY!  YOU WERE IN CARDIAC ARREST AND YOUR COWORKERS BROUGHT YOU BACK!”.

Uhhh…say what now?

With all of my systems coming back online…hearing, breathing and whatnot…things were a bit fuzzy but did he just say I was in cardiac arrest?

I tried raising my head, which turned out to be a bad idea first because I was wearing a C-collar and second the instant my head came off my chin the world started spinning.  

He really said CARDIAC @&$!-ing ARREST, right?  

Holy crap.

55 years, two months and 16 days.  Had my coworkers not jumped to the task and employed the training we receive that would have been my complete run.  From Columbia Hospital in Pittsburgh PA to the hallway of the Union 6/7 Center.

It’s hard for the mind to wrap around all this.  Having lived a half century plus and starting to turn the corn, so to speak into my “golden years“, after something like that I’ve realized that I’m not finished with the shit I have to do.

Luckily, so did Someone Else.

It’s been very surreal to say the very least. Now you’ve ridden a few times through entries where I’ve talked about my trips to the hospital for my leg and for my foot and other parts of the body, but the heart is only really crept into the picture of the last couple of years.   

My father died of congestive heart failure in 2002, and that unfortunately, puts me in the genetic club of likelihood of what would happen to me.

And it did.

But I still thought I had more time. Am I the best at managing my own health?  You would think probably not given what happened, but the type of heart failure that I have is a very sketchy one, because the heart is extremely weak. When I have heart glitches, it typically doesn’t hurt. I just can’t breathe.

My cardiologist are planning all kinds of different options to hopefully correct this, and that will start taking place in the next year.  It involves travel and really putting my brand new medical insurance through work to a test.

So now, the big question:  What was it like?

I mean, for a very brief moment, I was dead So was there a bright light that I was being encouraged to walk to?

No.  If you’re a fan of The Princess Bride, I think that though I was clinically dead to the lay person, I was in fact, “mostly dead”. I was brought back because there was enough activity in the body that got everything restarted once CPR was effectively applied.

So I’m thanking God for that. 

Two teachers, whom I’ve never spoken to in the two months that I’ve been employed at school were my heroines.  Yes, they were female teachers.  They did the chest compressions, they did the rescue breathing, and they hooked up the AED and applied the shock.

The best result of which is that I am here above ground, breathing, and relating the story.

What you don’t hear about is the fact that CPR is a physical agitation of the heart, which involves depressing the chest plate a couple of inches into the body.  So the result of which, if you survive, it is very much like what would happen if you received A rib bruise, or even a fracture of the rib.

The long and short of it is that these ladies kicked the crap out of me to bring me back from the edge.

Believe it or not even though it hurts. I’m glad to be here to feel it hurting.  

They saved my life, and the gratitude that I have for Shawna Hight and Audra Kahne cannot be measured.

There is my testimony. I don’t know how many people this blog reaches anymore, I don’t even know if blogger is something that even pops up on the radar on Google and it’s a Google product but to everybody who reads this I employ you in the strongest possible words: LEARN CPR. YOU COULD SAVE A LIFE.

I’m living proof.