A Phoenix truck driver whose heart stopped twice in the back of an ambulance walked back into the lives of the paramedics who brought him back Friday, three months after a roadside cardiac arrest nearly killed him. Michael Keathley, 53, suffered what doctors call a widowmaker heart attack in June, and by the time American Medical Response crews finished with him, they had shocked his heart and performed CPR through two separate cardiac arrests.
Keathley was not even behind the wheel when the earliest symptoms hit. According to Arizona’s Family, his truck had broken down and forced him to pull over, and that mechanical failure is what put him in position to call 911 before his condition became critical. He was not driving when the heart attack actually struck, and paramedics who arrived on scene found early signs of a heart attack and urged him to go to the hospital.
A Deadly Rhythm Sets In Minutes Into the Ride
Trevor, a paramedic with American Medical Response, told the outlet he advised Keathley to get checked out. Roughly five minutes into the trip to the hospital, Keathley developed a lethal heart rhythm and lost his pulse entirely. First responders shocked him and ran multiple rounds of CPR until he woke up, an outcome Trevor said he rarely sees. When Keathley groggily insisted he had just been sleeping, Trevor corrected him, telling him he had not been sleeping but taking what he called the forever sleep.
The reprieve did not last. About 15 minutes from the hospital, Keathley’s heart stopped a second time, and the crew again shocked him back to life. Trevor said he believed Keathley would be okay, calling his patient’s continued wakefulness a very good sign. He observed that Keathley was maintaining his neural status, staying awake, and that his brain was perfusing throughout the ordeal, which led Trevor to consider the entire event survivable.
Why So Few Survive Outside a Hospital
Weston Wieciech, an administrative supervisor who has worked in the field for more than 20 years, said few people who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital walk out of the hospital afterward. The numbers back him up: according to the American Red Cross, emergency medical services treat more than 250,000 non-traumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year in the U.S., and overall survival to hospital discharge sits at roughly 10% to 10.5%. A widowmaker heart attack raises the stakes even further — per Lee Health, citing the American Heart Association, that type of attack involves an 80% to 100% blockage of the left anterior descending artery, and only about 12% of people who suffer one outside a hospital survive…