Raised From Sudden Death

This blog is part of a series, if you haven’t read How My Wife Survived Cardiac Arrest, read it first and this post will make a whole lot more sense.

When my wife collapsed on stage, I thought she was suffering some sort of seizure even though my wife has never had an episode like this in her life. Later, I learned that it was full cardiac arrest caused by ventricular fibrillation. To this day we still don’t know exactly what caused it.

The Moment of Sudden Death

In relation to cardiac arrest, I think Dr. Eisenberg explains the event of sudden death better than I can in her book Resuscitate.

“Is it a tautalogy to state that sudden death is fatal? Not entirely. Sudden death can be reversed—if a defibrillatory reaches the victim in time. When the heart fibrillates, events happen fast, and death’s stopwatch begins its countdown. With the onset of ventricular fibrillation, the body is clinically dead. A person becomes totally unresponsive, and there are no vital signs—no pulse, no blood pressure, no breathing. The body becomes a mass of dying cells.

The ideal resuscitation restarts the heart before any permanent organ damage occurs. But the window of opportunity is very narrow indeed. With every passing minute, the likelihood of resuscitation diminishes. If nothing is done for four to five minutes, the condition of clinical death will begin to turn to biological death. And after ten to fifteen minutes, biological death will be complete. The person will be dead dead, and the return to a living state is impossible.”

Back To Life

Prior to this event, I had never seen anyone die and come back to life.

After Micah collapsed, she was struggling to breathe, and then the breaths became sparser, and then she let out one last breath in a groan, and I could see the life leaving her eyes.

Right before the people came up to do CPR, there was a moment when I looked at Pastor Frankie, and I think we were both thinking the same thing, there is no pulse, she is dead.

When EMS arrived they hooked her up to the heart monitor, and I everybody heard the sound of the flatline. A few minutes later, the heart began to beat sparsely, and then shot up to the rate of 152. Her heart was beating again.

As my wife was wheeled out of the auditorium, a pool of blood was left on the stage, we walked through the lobby and lines of people on both sides of us, everybody had their arms stretched towards us, and all you could hear were prayers and people weeping.

I was in complete shock and couldn’t believe this was happening, this was just a normal morning turned tragedy in a couple of seconds.

When my wife arrived at the hospital, I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. The nurses placed family, friends, and I in a little consulting room. Once Micah was stabilized in an induced coma I was allowed to see her for a few seconds to remove all her jewelry. I couldn’t budge her ring because her finger was swollen, so I just touched her hand and said, “be healed in the name of Jesus,” and nothing happened, at least from what I could see.

The doctors wheeled her to the cath lab, and after the procedure was done, the cardiologist came out and called all of us together to give us news. All he said was we need to pray! He then explained to me about the limitations of medicine and prepared me for the worst. Making it to the hospital alive was just the beginning of the miracle.

He said we can figure out what is going on with the heart, but we are very concerned about the brain. Doctors can’t fix brain damage.

I don’t believe in coincidence, and it is amazing to see all that had to take place for Micah to even make it to the hospital alive. Now, she needed the healing that only the power of God can do, restoring full brain function.

I don’t believe that using modern medicine shows a lack of faith. God has given us the ability to use creation to heal people, I think that is amazing! However, there are some things only God can do, and I don’t think prayer should be put on the backburner when it comes to healing.

Always pray for healing, (2 Chronicles 16:12) be persistent, take risks, and earnestly seek the faith of God.

A Moment of Transparency

While Micah was in the hospital, I didn’t always feel full of faith. The doubts came in like waves, and in the next blog post I would like to try to be vulnerable and share about my darkest moment, and what I learned about the power of prayer.