He doesn’t remember texting his mom that morning about the new house he’d found. He doesn’t remember heading to his job at AJ Rose Manufacturing in Avon—a job he’d started just three weeks earlier for better pay and better insurance to afford the heart medication he desperately needed.
What the 40-year-old father of seven does know is this: his heart stopped beating for 82 minutes that day, and by every medical measure, he shouldn’t be alive.
His survival came down to a series of extraordinary coincidences and a brand-new program at UH Elyria Medical Center that had launched just weeks before his cardiac arrest.
The miracles begin
When Johnson collapsed on the factory floor, a coworker he’d never met immediately began CPR. That coworker, Nelson Rodriguez, happened to be a paramedic…