Monday, February 22, 1999

Family narrowly avoids double tragedy

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Couple survives his-and-hers heart attacks

BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Donald Smith, 72, and Susie Smith, 69, are recovering from Jan. 15 heart attacks. (Glenn Hartong photo) | ZOOM |

        Randy Smith got to his parents' house just in time to see paramedics rolling his father away in a desperate attempt to revive him after a heart attack.

        Fewer then 10 minutes later, he watched helplessly as his mother collapsed — victim of a heart attack.

        “It was like, this can't be happening,” Randy Smith said. “The odds of this happening must be like getting struck by lightning ... twice.”

        Yet there they were, the four sons and one daughter of Donald and Susie Smith trailing a pair of ambulances to Franciscan-Mount Airy Hospital, fearing they could lose both parents.

        It was the beginning of a two-week ordeal for the Smith family and a story that surprised many of the medical professionals involved — not just because the heart attacks occurred so close together, but because the Smiths lived.

        “Nobody has ever heard of his-and-her cardiac arrests and full recovery for both. It was truly incredible,” said Dr. Edward J. Schloss, one of several heart specialists involved.

        It started with a stubborn man, a long driveway and an ice storm in mid-January.

        Once the snow and freezing rain stopped, burly 72-year-old Mr. Smith, spent the morning with a pick chipping at the ice on a steep driveway running down to Forfeit Run Road in Colerain Township.

        He wanted to clear it so his wife could go mall walking.

        The Smiths' sons often hire people to shovel their drives, but not Mr. Smith. This is a man who worked 37 years for the Lodge & Shipley machine tool company and followed Marines onto the beaches of Okinawa as a Seabee in World War II.

        After working on the driveway, Mr. Smith sat down on the living room couch.

        Around the corner in the kitchen, Mrs. Smith started fixing breakfast. Then she heard a gasping, gurgling sound.

        “He had his head on the back of the couch. He was red as a beet. It scared me to death,” Mrs. Smith said.

        She called their 49-year-old son, Steve, who lives about a half-mile away.

        As soon as he got there, he called 911. Then he started calling the rest of the family: Donna, 51, in Harrison; John, 50, in Walton, Ky.; Randy, 45,

        in Harrison; and Bob, 40, of Colerain Township.

        “When I got there, Dad was coming out the door on a stretcher,” Randy said. “So I went in the house asking, where's Mom? Mom was sitting in living room, and she didn't look right.”

        Firefighters Chris Niehaus, 23, and Franco Delzotti, 22, who were the first to help Mr. Smith, were still there.

        “At first I was just cleaning up. Then her son says, "Sir, I think something's wrong with Mom,'” Mr. Delzotti said. “She sort of falls down on the couch. There's no breath. No pulse. And I'm thinking, we're only set up for one code at a time.”

Back to work
        Luckily, paramedics who helped Mr. Smith left their truck behind to accompany him in the ambulance.

        Mr. Niehaus ran to the truck, grabbed spare equipment and called dispatch for another life squad-paramedic team.

        Mrs. Smith had crashed into the same type of cardiac arrest that hit her husband. Had the firefighters known Mrs. Smith's health history, it wouldn't have been a huge surprise.

        Mrs. Smith had been a member of the housekeeping staff at Northwest High School for many years but had to quit after triple-bypass heart surgery 15 years ago.

        Medical experts say the stress of seeing her husband nearly die was too much for her heart.

        As a crowd of arriving family members watched in disbelief, the crew used the defibrillator to shock Mrs. Smith's heart back into rhythm.

"Drive faster'
        Bob Smith was working in Dayton when he got the first call about his father.

        “Steve said, "You better get here as fast as you can, 'cause it's Dad,'” Bob recalled. “Then I called in from the road, and Steve said, "You better drive faster, 'cause Mom's on her way to the hospital, too.'”

        The drama didn't end there.

        At the hospital, family members spent all day going between their parents' separate rooms in intensive care. By about 8:30 p.m., some of the family left to get some rest, thinking things seemed fairly stable.

        “It was about 10 p.m., and I was on my way to Mom's room when I heard a nurse say, "His heart stopped. Room 11.' and I thought, "Oh God, that's Dad's room!'” Randy said.

        Randy sat in a waiting room, steeling himself for the bad news. Ten minutes later, a nurse told him that they'd gotten his dad's heart beating again.

        “This happened three more times that night,” Randy said.

        By about 2 a.m., Mr. Smith looked so bad that a nurse suggested calling the rest of the family back to the hospital. Then, Mrs. Smith started having complications.

        Her blood pressure plunged to 70/40. Her heart slowed to as low as 42 beats a minute. Again, the staff brought her back.

        “They told us that getting through the first night was key,” Randy said. “I remember thinking how I couldn't wait to see the sun come up.”

        After two days, the couple was transferred to Christ Hospital for open-heart surgery. The chance of dying on the operating table was another dip on the roller coaster.

        Mr. Smith needed two operations: a five-vessel bypass and, a week later, installation of a miniature, permanent defibrillator.

        Mrs. Smith needed the same kind of defibrillator.

        By Jan. 27, the operations were complete. On Jan. 30, the Smiths were well enough to go home to begin months of recuperation. It pains Mr. Smith to know somebody else will have to mow the lawn and shovel the driveway.

        “I'm feeling a lot better,” he said, “but after something like this, you lose every bit of strength you had.”

No memory, no control
        Until he collapsed, Mr. Smith never knew he had heart trouble. He also didn't know his wife was sick until he woke up at Christ Hospital, the day they were transferred.

        “I remember talking to her and saying, "I'm going to go finish the snow.' That's it. It was like turning an electric light off,” Mr. Smith said.

        Mrs. Smith recalls seeing the medics working on her husband and think ing that he was gone when her own troubles began.

        “I had no control over my body,” she said. “I tried to say something and it never got out.”

        Later, with Mom and Dad resting safely at home, Bob and Randy Smith marveled at how many ways things could have been so much worse.

        What if Steve hadn't been home when Mom called? What if it took just a minute longer for that first crew to get to the house? What if the firefighters had left before Mrs. Smith collapsed?

        “If any link in the chain had been broken, one or both of them would be dead,” Randy Smith said.

A rare happy ending
        For Mr. Niehaus and Mr. Delzotti, the run to Forfeit Run Road was the wildest of their careers.

        Mr. Delzotti was 16 when he got turned on to firefighting after a ride-along during a Boy Scout program. He joined Colerain Township's fire department three years ago.

        Mr. Niehaus has been on the job for five years, starting right out of high school.

        Despite their youth, both men have made enough medical runs to know that so many times these stories end badly.

        “It's nice to see you actually made a difference in somebody's life,” Mr. Niehaus said.

       

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