Death: The Prequel

It has come to my attention that some of you don't know about Vic's death last year, so here goes:

On July 7, 2010, we were in the Apple store at the Flatiron Crossing mall taking an iPad class. we were still in the beginning of the class, learning stuff we already knew about, so Vic had been leaning forward, whispering to me about this and that and not paying much attention to the class. But the last time he leaned forward, he just kept going. Collapsed right there and hit his head on what seemed like a hard cement floor (it wasn't, really, as we found out when we went back there a month later). There were no warning signs, no symptoms, no pain, nothing. One minute we were talking; the next minute, not so much.

Fortunately, a doctor was in the store, and she took control—made sure his airway was open, talked to 911 so the paramedics would know what they were walking into, and eventually gave him mouth to mouth and CPR. The paramedics came, and although it seemed like they were there forever, it was only nine minutes from when they arrived on the scene to when they left. I think they had to shock him a couple of times in the store, but they were keeping me busy, so I didn’t see any of it.

The paramedics took him to Avista, where the ER docs worked on him for a couple of hours before they finally stabilized him. In fact, even after they stabilized him and moved him to the ICU, he coded and they had to shock him again. He was on a ventilator for two days, during which the doctors weren’t sure what he would be like when he woke up. He had been down for a long time with the paramedics (clinically dead for 20 minutes, we found out later), and no one is quite sure how much oxygen the brain gets during CPR.

But they took him off the ventilator, and he slowly but surely came out of the fog, and his physical recovery was swift. The fogginess claimed his brain for a few days, but that started wearing off too.

For the longest time (or what seemed like the longest time), the doctors weren’t sure what happened and what the real problem was, so they did a lot of tests on him—pretty much all the –grams: echocardiogram, sonogram, angiogram, candygram. (Just kidding on that last one—wanted to make sure you were paying attention.) What they finally decided was that a person with coronary artery disease, as Vic has, just builds up scar tissue in the heart over time, and this ends up weakening the heart. That can have a lot of repercussions, but in this case, it caused his heart to fall out of rhythm, which caused his blood pressure to drop, which caused him to drop. So they implanted a defibrillator, and if his heart ever behaves in this way again, the defibrillator will shock him back into rhythm.

The doctors were very clear about the fact that he shouldn’t have lived through an ordeal such as this. Every day we were in the hospital, they kept telling me a statistic that was worse than the day before. finally ended up with these two gems: 60 percent of people who crash outside a hospital don’t survive, and he was within seconds of death. SECONDS. Like, if that doctor had been more interested in her latte and iPad … well, you complete that sentence.

The best thing that happened was getting transferred to Longmont United Hospital on the Monday following “the event.” Because Longmont lets pets visit you! I had put Wags in the doggy day care on the Thursday after the event because I knew I wouldn’t be home much to take care of her. But I raced up to the ranch and got her out of prison and took her to the hospital. She climbed up into his bed, snuggled up next to him and stayed right there until I had to take her home a few hours later. It was definitely his best day in the hospital.

We came home a few days later. There was a period where they thought he would have to be transferred to an in-patient rehab hospital, and then he defied the odds and they thought just some out-patient rehab, and by the time he was discharged, the physical therapist said “Just have him take four walks a day—he doesn’t need any more PT” and the occupational therapist said “Just have him rest after every task he performs—he doesn’t need any more OT.”

In the month after the event, he got better every day. He was still tired a lot, still a little fuzzy on some memories and didn't have a great appetite, but considering what he went through, he recovered quite well. At the hospital his doctors and nurses considered him nothing short of a miracle, and I would have to agree.

I'll admit that we kind of thought we'd have a few years before another big incident, and we're more than a little ticked off that it wasn't even one year. But as my daughter would say, that's another story. ;-)