You Made It!
The week’s almost over. Your weekend plans?
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KTBS 3 News- Should the video be removed?
- Jail escapee makes court appearance
- Man who threatened foreign official sentenced today
- Tony Alamo church member to be sentenced in court today
- School Board questioned why they waited so long to sue over leaking school roof
- Police charge woman with stealing former roomate's identity
- Lattier sworn in as city court judge
- Wacky weather driving patients to doctor's office
- Fire crews warn of dangers of outdoor burning
- Northwest Louisiana has first confirmed case of flu
September 26th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Happy Hour with friends, clean house and my favorite Sunday morning Target run. I love Fridays!
September 26th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Going to dinner with HT tonight and watching Alabama beat Georgia tomorrow night.
September 26th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Happy Hour, yes, that’s a given. But, I’m looking forward to my VACATION NEXT WEEK!!! SWEET!!!
Sherri, don’t miss me too much!
September 26th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
It’ll be the first weekend for me without a hurricane or working a concert or live broadcast or something to interrupt a perfectly good weekend… I am pooped! So I am going to hang around the house with the kids, maybe go to the park. I need some VA-CA-TI-ON
Have a great weekend Sherri and the cast of characters of the blog too!
September 26th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
You, too, Todd and the rest of you! Enjoy!
What if, instead of saying, “KTBS 3 News at 5 starts right now”, I say, “My weekend starts in 30-minutes.”
September 26th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Happy Vacation, Trish!
September 26th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
I have a story to tell and at the end, you’ll understand why I am looking forward to a restful weekend.
I’ve been working 12-14 hour days since Hurricane Gustav and only had 3 days off during that time, none consecutive. Last Sunday about 530 pm, I received a phone call from my neighbor saying that my significant other of almost 18 years, Bill, had collapsed at Brookshires on Line Avenue and had been taken by ambulance to LSUHSC but was blue and not breathing. A good Samaritan at the store had gotten our address from his driver’s license and had come over looking to see if she could find any family. I wasn’t home but our neighbor has my cell phone and immediately called me.
A co-worker drove me to LSU and we didn’t know if Bill was dead or alive. He’s just 57 but has had many health issues. Needless to say, it was very frightening. At LSU we learned that he was alive but they didn’t know if he had a brain bleed, a heart attack or what and they all seemed amazed that he was breathing at all and talking, albeit with confusion.
He didn’t recognize either his sister or me and kept asking the same questions over and over again: Where am I? What happened? As soon as we answered, he asked it again. The Cardiac doctors at LSU were beyond wonderful and he was immediately sent for a CT scan of his head to make sure there wasn’t a brain bleed or injury or stroke that had caused him to fall and stop breathing. That was negative so he was taken for an echocardiogram which showed his heart was weak. The enzyme blood test said that he hadn’t had a heart attack but we were told that it is sometimes inaccurate after someone has been brought back to life.
At midnight, this doctor called in a team to do a heart catherization. It could have waited til morning. After all, it was a Sunday night and people had to be called in from home but they did it. The heart cath went off without a flaw and Bill was found to have 80 percent blockage in one artery so they stented it but his doctor said that is NOT what caused his heart to stop and that he had not had a heart attack.
He was diagnosed with a weak heart and they said they would implant a defibrillator in about 30 days and left it at that.
The next morning that was upped to Wednesday as his doctor said we didn’t need that hanging over our heads. The defibrillator was implanted on Wednesday and this afternoon Bill was discharged home and at this moment is watching the Presidential Debate while eating some supper and relaxing. He just finished folding a load of towels one-handed since they have his right arm in a sling so he won’t put it over his head til the surgery site is healed.
What makes this story so profound is that if not for the tireless efforts of two nurses who happened to be in Brookshires at the time this happened, Bill would be dead and buried by now. Here is the story as I have been able to reconstruct it.
Sunday afternoon, I was working and Bill decided he needed to go and get some laundry detergent, butter and fruit. He went to Brookshires and while in the Express Checkout Lane, just fell out. A woman in line tried to catch him but he was too big and he hit the floor fast and hard. He almost bit his tongue in half, he broke the teeth off of his front bridge, got a nasty bump on his head, skinned his knees and arms and died. He was probably dead before he hit the floor. His heart had gone into Ventricular fibrillation and just stopped. During ventricular fibrillation, cardiac output drops to zero, and, unless remedied promptly, death usually ensues within minutes.
A call went out over the Brookshires loudspeaker for the manager and the guy who made the call still had the button depressed so the rest of the conversation went out over the store. A nurse in the rear of the store heard something about ‘calling 911′ and left her basket and RAN to the front of the store. She found Bill blue and lifeless, turned him on his back and started compressions. Another call went out for a nurse or doctor in the store and another nurse came forward and started sharing her breath with Bill, 1 puff for every 30 compressions. They kept this CPR up until the paramedics from Station #10 on Oneonta arrived to take over. The nurse said they performed CPR for less than 3 minutes but the manager at Brookshires, Mr. Lockard, said it seemed like 20. I went back to the store to talk to him on Monday, to let him know Bill was alive, and he pointed to the floor and said, ‘He was right there, dead, turning blue…”
The paramedics shocked Bill when they arrived and while his heart responded, it went into an arrythmia. On the way to LSU, he died again and they again shocked him. This time his heart went into a normal sinus rhythm and they put him on a nasal canula for oxygen. They had been preparing to intubate him but it wasn’t necessary.
When we attempted over the next few days to thank any of the Physicians or the Fire Department involved, we got the same answer every time. “The Nurses”. Had these two women not responded so quickly and so unselfishly, Bill’s brain would have been starved of oxygen while waiting for the Fire Dept. They may have revived him but his brain function would have been severely affected and more than likely, he’d have been on a ventilator for a few days that was eventually turned off.
The other thing that saved him was the fact that he was in Brookshires. Had this happened at home, he would have been alone and I would have found him dead when I got home that evening. By leaving the house and being in a public place, it gave him a chance as there happened to be help there.
That first nurse I mentioned, the one who was shopping in the rear of the store and came running? Her name is Ms. Hudson and she works as a nurse at Willis Knighton North in the CARDIAC INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. (freaky, huh?)
The 2nd nurse didn’t leave her name and left once the fire dept arrived. I don’t think she works in the WK system and perhaps is an LSU nurse herself. Those at Brookshires who watched them said they worked as a well oiled team and looked like they had worked together for years when in truth, they had never met.
Statistics say that only about 1 percent of people whose hearts are shocked ‘in the field’ live to tell about it. Bill’s story spread fast around LSU and people would come in and say, “you’re the one that died at Brookshires…do you realize hardly anyone survives that?”
After living through the hell of having worked at Sam’s Club Shelter and then dealt with the Disaster Food Stamp Progam in the ensuing weeks, this experience reminded me that there are some great people out there, people who do things for others without thinking of themselves first. These women didn’t know Bill, didn’t know if he had a communicable disease…they just did what was right.
Sorry to be so long-winded but what we’ll spend our weekend doing is being thankful. Thanks for listening and all of you take a moment to realize how tenuous our hold on life is.
September 26th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Wow..MaryS910. Thank you and how awesome for the way things turned out! Want to do an ArkLaTex Miracle story on Bill and what happened? It might give others beyond this site hope and inspiration. Just let me know next week at stalley@ktbs.com. I’m so happy for y’all..and grateful for the generosity and instincts of those in our community.
September 27th, 2008 at 7:02 am
The kindness of strangers……I’m so glad he’s ok. We’ll be praying for both of you.