How I Survived Cardiac Arrest

Writers about natural health topics are not really supposed to get sick. We would prefer to pretend we have all the answers, but I have always known I don't. I've always been better at raising the right questions.

Just as I would never recommend you wave a stalk of broccoli over a heart attack victim and give her a lecture on healthy nutrition, when I had my own cardiac arrest, not once but three times on the same day, I was very glad I was in an especially well-equipped hospital. Being in the right place at a bad time made all the difference for me, as it does for anyone who has a cardiac arrest.

Impending Doom and Cardiac Arrest

My cardiac arrest did not come as a surprise. I had had not just one but two "widowmaker" heart attacks three months earlier. Because I didn't have active insurance, it had taken five tries to find a hospital that was willing to give me the surgical treatment I needed now and talk about how to pay the bill later. 

One of the most respected heart hospitals in the United States had provided me with two cardiac catheterizations - procedures in which the surgeon inserts a wire through the groin to introduce copper coils into blocked arteries - and after my persistent requests, scheduled me for a third procedure to repair a "irreparable" blockage in my left anterior descending artery (LAD). Fortunately, I had an especially skilled surgeon.

All had gone well. But I somehow for more than a week just knew I was about to die and only being in the telemetry ward, where a nurse watched my EKG 24 hours a day, would make it possible for doctors to save me. And it turned out I was right.

The Right Place and the Right Time for Sudden Death

About an hour after my third procedure a voice in my head that sounded like my deceased mother told me "You're about to suffer something the doctor completely does not expect, but you will be OK." About that time a nurse educator stopped by room just to make a visit. At the same moment, my regular nurse and her student assistant got a "rapid response" (code blue) call from the telemetry nurse that my heart was slowing down to a stop. I commented to my nurse "I don't feel too good" (less than eloquent for last words for a writer, I know) and my heart stopped.

I remember floating to the ceiling, see my dead parents and dozens of departed friends and family, and being told, "You won't be here," meaning floating at the ceiling, "very long."

With a horrible gasp I woke up on a gurney feeling the nurse giving me CPR, struggling to breathe again. I had been injected with epinephrine and atropine. A heart surgeon had happened to be walking by my room when I coded. He was talking to me to keep me awake. Despite the fact I don't speak Italian, I answered him in Italian. 

The gurney goes through the door to the surgery and I'm gone again. I wake to the doctor saying "360," and my heart stops a third time. 

But my doctor knew how to wake the dead. I came to life a third time as he said, "This is going to hurt," and he opened an artery without anesthetic so he could introduce a balloon to give my heart CPR from the inside out. 

I had suffered an aneurysm, a "blow out," in an artery on the side of my heart my surgeon had not worked on earlier in the morning. I would have to lie still for two days until I could get the artery rebuilt in a fifth heart operation. But I was going to make it because I was in the right place at the right time for me.

What Is Needed To Survive Sudden Death

It took a lot to bring me back from sudden death three times in the same day. Without CPR, heart stimulant drugs, electrical shock from a defibrillator, and finally a procedure that has to be performed by a heart surgeon, I would not have made it. However, mine was an extreme case. Not everyone needs the maximum level of intervention to survive sudden death.

CPR Works, But Not Very Well

The best-known treatment for sudden death is cardiopulmonary resuscitation, also known as CPR. The plus side of CPR is that almost anyone can learn how to do it. The down side of CPR is that, most of the time, it does not work.

In Europe, about 21% of sudden death victims who are given CPR by bystanders survive with brain function intact. In the United States, according to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, only about 18% of sudden death victims given traditional CPR (chest compressions alternating with breaths blown into the mouth) survive to be released from the hospital. A relatively new approach to CPR, however, nearly doubles the survival rate.

Cardiocerebral Resuscitation Doubles Survival Rate

The newer approach to treating people whose hearts have stopped involves giving compressions but not stopping to breathe into the mouth. This way already-oxygenated blood keeps flowing into the brain, but there is no risk that too much pressure will be applied to the chest, stopping the flow of blood from the heart. (The older style CPR probably killed more people than it saved.) The surprising result of new approach is that 34%, about twice as many, live to be released from the hospital.

There is an easy way to know whether the procedure worked. If the patient gasps for air, oxygenated blood is finding its way to the brain, and brain death has been averted.

Resuscitation without blowing into the mouth has become the standard of manual first aid for people of all ages, even infants. Advances in electronics, however, increase the survival rate even more.

Automatic Electronic Defibrillators Save Lives

An even more reliable emergency treatment for cardiac arrest is the automatic electronic defibrillator, or AED. These portable EKG and shock machines automatically detect a "shockable rhythm" in the heart that indicates that the lower pumping chambers of the heart can be restarted. If there is a shockable rhythm, the machine gives a series of step by step instructions for bystanders to use the device to restart the heart.

The latest statistics indicate that 74% of people treated with an automatic electronic defibrillator, designed to be used by people who do not have medical training, survive their cardiac arrest and return to normal life, provided the machine is used in the first three minutes. If the machine is only used three minutes or more after the heart stops beating, then the survival rate is lowered to 49%. Treatment with AED, however, is far more likely to be successful than treatment with CPR or CCR alone.

And some people will still only survive if given surgical interventions. It's all about being in the right place at the right time.

You Might Make the Difference in Saving Someone's Life

The important thing to remember, however, is that you might be the critical factor in providing care in cardiac arrest. You don't have to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to save a life. In fact, it's better if you don't. You just have to have taken a two- or three-hour course in giving the new CCR.

And if you have access to an AED, you only need to be brave enough to follow instructions. 

Don't stop there. Call an ambulance. Get the victim of cardiac arrest into a hospital as quickly as possible.

There's not a lot you can do to have your cardiac arrest in the right place, unless, like me, you had a sense of impending doom and you nagged and pestered your doctor to let you into the hospital. But there is a great deal you and your community can do to help cardiac arrest victims survive even outside the hospital if you take time to prepare.