Nevertheless, I Live

But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill.  Psalm 3:3-4

On May 30, 2015, I died. I was running a 5K race in Clever, MO when I literally dropped dead from a heart attack. That heart attack, or myocardial infarction as my doctor called it, instantly triggered a heart malfunction called sudden cardiac arrest. Sudden cardiac arrest, or SCA, is a condition in which the electrical connection between the heart and brain somehow goes haywire causing the heart to suddenly and unexpectedly stop beating. Blood flow to the brain and other vital organs ceases and breathing abruptly stops resulting in an immediate loss of consciousness. The term clinically dead is sometimes used interchangeably to describe this condition. It simply means that the subject has no heartbeat and no respiration.

The statistical odds of surviving a cardiac arrest event outside of a hospital environment are less than 6%. Those odds decrease by 10% for each minute that passes without resuscitation. After seven minutes in cardiac arrest, regardless of the level of treatment up to that point, the statistical odds of survival are essentially zero. An electric shock delivered by a defibrillator to restore a normal rhythm to a non-functioning heart is the only effective treatment for SCA. If a defibrillator is not immediately available, CPR (chest compressions) must be performed until an AED (automated external defibrillator) arrives on the scene in order to keep oxygenated blood flowing to the brain. Without proper CPR, a cardiac arrest victim might be resuscitated but in a brain-dead condition.

No one knows for sure how long I was down before Blake Chaney rounded a turn and saw me lying face down on the road. He ran to me and immediately began performing CPR. Blake is a big, strong kid, as well as a trained firefighter, and he did it right. With his first few compressions he probably broke most of my ribs. That was a good thing. Deep compressions are necessary to keep the blood moving and that means you have to break some ribs. Other good Samaritans came along and helped, most of them I don’t know and have never met. The Clever Fire Dept. was called to bring their AED. A police officer picked up the phone that had been strapped to my arm and called my wife.

Rebecca Shawhan had finished the race and was at the finish line waiting for me to arrive. She is a runner and had won 1st place female in the race. I, on the other hand, had just started running and was still trying to finish a 5K without having to walk part of it. My wife ran back down the course to the place where responders were working furiously to revive her husband. Bystanders held her back at a distance. Things were not going well. The seven-minute mark had come and gone. The AED had not yet arrived. A cardiac nurse who happened to be at the race was on the scene yelling, “Tim take a breath, Tim take a breath!” Rebecca could see her husband’s legs and head move with each compression that was applied, but life had left his body. Blake and the other heroes of the day ignored the statistics. They ignored the science and the laws of physics and continued with CPR for over fifteen minutes – then the AED arrived.

As my wife was being kept at a distance, bystanders came to her. They hugged her, they cried with her, and they prayed with her. The clock kept ticking. Her husband was still lifeless. Her hope was quickly fading. An ambulance pulled up and one of the responders retrieved from it a small machine. As they attached electrodes to the chest of her now motionless husband Rebecca, my wife, dropped to her knees and, looking upwards, cried out in a loud voice – “Lord, please breathe life back into my husband!” At that same moment the automated external defibrillator delivered a 3000-volt charge to its subject and, after being still for well over fifteen minutes, my heart started beating again.

Nearly everyone who was associated with my rescue and recovery refer to it as a miracle. Even the nurses at my cardiologist’s office call it a miracle, although the skeptical physician’s assistant prefers to say that I am a “very, very lucky man.” The facts of the situation say that I should not be alive. Medical science and mathematical statistics say that I should not be alive. My own research after the fact convinces me that I should not be alive.

People ask me if I consider it a miracle that I am alive. My answer is “I don’t know.” There are a lot of questions about this event in my life to which I do not know the answer. I don’t know why God would keep me alive when so many others that I have known have passed away seemingly before their time. At times I struggle with that. Why did my wife’s sister die two days after this event while I live? I don’t know. Why did my daughter-in-law’s father die at so young an age while I live? I don’t know. Why did my son’s good friend Kris die in the prime of life while I live? I don’t know. People ask me if I feel that God kept me alive for a special purpose. I don’t know. If He did, I don’t know what it is. There are so many, many things that I do not know.

But, amongst all of the “I don’t knows” there is one thing that I do know. I know that at a moment when all hope was lost, when the laws of science and nature said that it could not happen, a woman humbly dropped to her knees and desperately cried out to God – asking Him to breathe life back into her lifeless husband. And, in His infinite grace and mercy, God gave her the desire of her heart and granted her request. This thing I know for sure. And that, I think, is enough.