In Praise of Grace, CPR, and Landlines
Maureen Callahan Smith, LICSW
To hear the story read by the author, click the link below:
https://on.soundcloud.com/JAF72
With the life of the most precious person in the world to me on the line, while my brain froze in white-hot panic, my hands took over and just got busy.
On an early winter evening nine years ago, my then sixty-something-year-old husband Anthony died.
I was talking about it with him last night and even all this time later, we are still trying to digest the series of events, terrifying and miraculous, that followed.
It happened during a late afternoon nap. We had lost our dear friend Christine that morning, and had taken our heavy hearts out for a sunset walk after a major snowstorm. A photo from our walk showed Anthony, bundled up against the cold and poised beside a ten-foot snowdrift.
Once home, we had put dinner to warm in the oven and curled up for a nap.
At some point, I heard a noise emanate from him, a sound I had never heard before, like a gurgle at the back of his throat. I turned, unable to see his face in the dark room, and called his name. There was no answer.
I moved closer, repeating his name more urgently. Silence. I moved to turn on a light and reprimanded him, “Stop fooling around, you’re scaring me!”
Once the light came on, my heart nearly stopped. He was motionless, staring at the ceiling as I shouted his name. Led by some desperate instinct, I reached my fingers to his neck for a pulse, madly trying to make sense of what was happening. His normally robust, albeit very irregular heartbeat could not be found. He had been diagnosed years earlier with atrial fibrillation, and had been stable since he started taking blood thinning medication, with close follow-up.
I leaned toward his face. He was not breathing. Now I was screaming his name in panic.
The next seconds unfolded in blind terror. One of my hands reached for the phone — our landline was right beside the bed — and punched in 911, as my other hand began pushing on his sternum. I cradled the phone under my neck while I began pumping his chest with both hands.
A kind woman came on the line immediately and asked a few questions, then asked if I knew CPR.“I’m doing it right now,” I barked, alternating the chest compressions with pinching his nostrils and breathing twice into his mouth.
People asked me in the aftermath how I knew CPR, or remembered in such a moment to use it. The answer is that I worked in a small community hospital where we were required to practice CPR annually on a life-sized rubber dummy. Each year we whined about it, since as social workers, we thought it highly unlikely that we would ever be called upon to save a life.
But there is a reason for the repeated drilling of this skill. In this moment, fifteen years after my last CPR refresher, and with the life of the most precious person in the world to me on the line, while my brain froze in white-hot panic, my hands took over and just got busy.
The woman on 911 reassured me that the EMTs had taken off and would be arriving in seconds. Was the front door locked? It was. “Then give him two more hard chest pumps and run as fast as you can to open it for them. They should be arriving just as you get there.”
As I reached the door, I was nearly knocked over by a blur of husky uniformed men barking questions at me as they shoved the furniture aside as if they were matchsticks. Something inside me soared in relief in response to their utter seriousness of purpose. It was a small platoon of six or eight guys: EMTs, cops, and curiously, I thought, even in my panicked state, a fire truck was parked outside, lights flashing, with firefighters pacing the street as if on guard.
In seconds, the EMTs had Anthony on our dining room floor. They knelt laboring over him as a young policeman built like a linebacker took me in hand, his job clearly to keep the hysterical wife out of the way. As he gently pulled me into the hallway, I tried to bolt away.
“No!” I told him. “If my husband is dying, I want to be with him!”
My new friend the cop was not taking no for an answer.
“Listen. I saw some mail — your name is Maureen? Irish Catholic? Look in my eyes, Maureen. I’m Mark, Italian Catholic. The best thing we can do for him right now, Maureen, is to pray.” His tone was gentle, familiar, like a patient father trying to soothe and distract a despondent toddler.
“Can you pray with me? What shall we do, Hail Mary or Our Father?” Before I knew it, I was staring up into his face, clinging to both his hands, and sobbing out Hail Marys with him.
After an infinite three minutes, I heard a muffled voice from the dining room saying something about a pulse. My cop gently held my arm as I reacted.
“Did you say you had a pulse?” I called, my voice rising in hope.
“We do. But it’s very faint,” the EMT answered, his voice flat. What I had not seen was that they had resuscitated Anthony with a portable cardiac defibrillator. I had never noticed these devices before, but now when I see them attached to the walls of public places like the airport, I want to go up and kiss them.
More blur ensued. My cop asked me to phone someone. Anthony’s sister Rosie and her husband Michael, who are both family and dear friends to us, lived just ten minutes away. I got them on the first ring.
“We’re on our way.” Michael assured me, and in what seemed like a matter of moments, they were walking in the front door, just as the EMTs rolled Anthony, now on a gurney and wrapped in blankets, to the waiting ambulance.
There was a brief standoff when they announced that they had been instructed to take him to an ER at a nearby community hospital.
“He’s not going there,” I countered, suddenly fierce with clarity. “His cardiologist is at the Brigham. I want him taken to Boston.” Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of the best hospitals in the country, was where he was being followed for his cardiac care.
“Well we’ve been told. . . ,” he responded.
“I don’t care what you’ve been told,” I heard myself saying to the nice EMT who was saving my husband’s life. “I want him taken to the Brigham.”
In short order, and after some radio conferring, he returned and told me he had the okay to take him to Mass General, another major Boston hospital with a well-known cardiology unit.
“Fine.” I agreed.
The relatively quiet 20-minute drive into Boston on an early Sunday evening was followed by an agonizing wait. As staff worked on Anthony in the ER, we were ushered to a private waiting room
With years of hospital social work under my belt, I knew that this was not a good sign. “This is where they take you to give you the bad news,” I muttered to Rosie.
My legs seemed to have lost all circulation, leaving me trembling and unable to stand, my body’s response to the shock. With grim faces, they told us that Anthony had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. His best and only hope was a hypothermia protocol, which would reduce his body temperature by several degrees and maintain him in a coma for 24 hours. The protocol would give his brain its best shot at healing, although there was no guarantee that he would wake up.
“Some people get up and walk out of the unit and go on with their lives after this, and some never wake up, and we have no way of predicting which will be which,” was the most encouraging thing they said to us.
There followed long days in the Cardiovascular ICU. They put Anthony into a medically-induced coma, but he didn’t wake up after the 24-hour cooling period was up. More worried days followed, and the neurology team made somber rounds. As we waited, friends and family joined us, taking over the waiting room to cry and laugh and spell one another.
A local priest, contacted by my girlhood best friend, suddenly appeared, to sit with us for an afternoon and listen. He gathered a troop of us at Anthony’s bedside — active and “retired” Catholics, Jews, agnostics, everyone — and led us in taking turns anointing him with blessed oil as well as with our tears and kisses. Then he came back the next day.
The MGH team of acupuncturists, which Anthony was part of in his work, arrived in the midst of their own jam-packed clinic days to administer their needles, those wands of healing, with such love that it made me weep to watch them. Throughout all of it, Anthony remained wherever he’d gone, suspended somewhere we couldn’t reach.
We continued to talk into his ear, as I had been doing from the outset, telling him what was happening in his hospital room. We played his favorite music on an iPod, in hopes that if we couldn’t reach him, then Van Morrison or John Coltrane could.
At one point when I was alone with him, I leaned forward to speak in his ear. I knew my husband, and I knew that if he couldn’t come back as “himself,” as father to his children, husband to me, grandfather to the first grandchild his daughter was joyously expecting, brother and uncle and friend and healer to so many, then he wouldn’t want to come back.
So, I told him that it was okay. I told him I understood, and that while I desperately wanted much, much more time with him, if he needed to, he could let go. I didn’t know how, but I would find a way to be okay. We all would.
What followed soon after seemed borrowed from a fairy tale. Or a bible story.
I was standing beside him during one of those Days of Waiting, telling him that I was leaving for a few minutes to get something to eat. Family members would stay with him while I was gone. As I spoke, I noticed an opening in the johnnie he was wearing, at his shoulder, and I leaned over to kiss the triangle of exposed skin. As I did, as if turning a great, heavy wheel, Anthony turned his head toward me, and in slow motion, as if pushing against weights, opened his beautiful blue eyes and looked into my face.
I cried out, “Honey! HELLO!! Where have you been my sweetheart?” the words came tumbling out as I burst into tears. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded his head at me.
“I’m so glad to see you, Sweetie, I’ve MISSED you so much!” His eyes were locked onto mine and once again, he nodded.
In this moment, I knew with every cell of my body that my husband was on his way back. Another slight nod, and a single tear escaped from the corner of his eye.
Ecstatic, I bolted the five steps to the nursing station to report the news. “He’s opened his eyes and nodded at me! Snoopy Dance!” I announced, throwing my arms up in joy.
The staff were not quite so enthusiastic.
“There can still be reflexive, non-volitional movements,” I was told by a weary-looking nurse, all caution, lest we get our hopes up in error. “Let’s keep watching and see.”
Shortly after, Anthony’s brothers stood at his feet, making joking remarks about the long rest he’d had, pushing for another response from him. When he opened his eyes this time, he carefully raised one finger to them in the time-honored gesture of the elder brother putting his younger ones in their place.
The room erupted in raucous laughter. The staff was summoned. “Okay,” the cautious nurse told me, a wry smile breaking across her face at the particular gesture that had sealed the deal. “You can have your Snoopy Dance now.”
Although it was a long road back, we were blessed beyond all odds, beyond our wildest dreams, with his recovery. By spring he was back working with patients, his physical health on the mend, and his mental faculties flawless.
But none of it would have been possible without utter grace, and without many, many things going right.
And, as I was told repeatedly, none of it would have been possible if CPR had not been started within those critical first three minutes, and followed by cardiac defibrillation.
Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), I learned later, is an electrical malfunction of the heart which can result from a number of underlying causes. The chance of survival remains at less than 5 percent, and the factor most greatly influencing the outcome is whether or not CPR is instituted immediately. Beyond a three- or four-minute delay, death or irreversible brain damage is the outcome.
This week marked the anniversary; nine years since Anthony’s SCA. That’s 3,285 days. It seems particularly timely to share this story now, because of the anniversary, because of NFL player Damar Hamlin’s similar recent crisis, and because February, the month of Valentine’s day, is American Heart month.
3,285 days. That’s eight wedding anniversaries, five grandchildren born, and trips to Zion, the Grand Canyon, Paris, Tuscany, Ireland, and our beloved Cape Cod and Berkshires. That’s hundreds of patients being helped by my gifted acupuncturist /healer husband. All those extra days, rich with family and laughter and hugs and friendship, that we’ve been gifted with.
I’m thankful for the RNs who drilled us years ago with CPR training (thank you, Mary Ann Petrillo, wherever you are!), for the local EMTs and the incredible caregivers at MGH. I’m also grateful to the loving Boston priest who appeared in the midst of hell and showed us the best of what the Catholic Church is about, and to God, because for reasons I don’t understand, we were graced with a miracle.
I am also a fan of landlines, damn the cost. If I had needed to stop and search for my cell phone, or if it had not been charged, what would have happened, I wonder.
And finally, I kiss the head of my beautiful, irreverent, and very much alive husband, who continues to pay it forward by helping other suffering folks with his healing acupuncture needles.
We hope that sharing our story might inspire some people to get trained — or renewed — in CPR/Basic Life Support skills.
3,285 days.
For someone you love, or for a stranger, you could make the difference.
© 2023 all rights reserved, Maureen Callahan Smith
LINK for American Heart Association Basic Life Support Training:
LINK for American Red Cross Basic Life Support Training:
