Back to Life

A patient who had been "dead" for 82 minutes was walking up & down the second-floor surgical ward of Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo last week, as though nothing had happened. A tall, dour-faced man of 59, he stood erect and stepped right out in his sloppy hospital slippers. He did not talk much, but that was part of the mental condition which brought him to the hospital three years ago.

The "Miracle Man," as doctors and nurses have come to call him, seemed to have something wrong with an artery. To get a clearer picture, the doctors decided to inject a dye into the artery. At 1:30 p.m. on March 15, the patient was wheeled into the X-ray room and anesthetized with sodium pentothal. Before Surgeon J. Cuthbert Owens could inject the dye, the patient began to turn blue. His heart had stopped.

One Quick Cut. A few minutes without oxygen would damage his brain beyond repair, so there was no time to take him to a sterile operating room. The anesthetist promptly slipped a tube through the patient's mouth into the windpipe, started pumping oxygen into it. Dr. Owens grabbed a scalpel and cut open the left chest. He reached in, pushed the left lung aside and grasped the patient's heart. Sixty times a minute he squeezed the heart, "with the pressure applied from the bottom up, like milking a cow backwards." With each squeeze, blood was pumped through the arteries, carrying oxygen to the brain.

After ten minutes, Dr. Owens' hand tired and Dr. Levi Reynolds took his place, seizing the patient's heart without losing a beat. Twenty-five doctors and nurses watched in tense silence, listened to the husky, artificial breathing and the squishing of the massaged heart. After 20 minutes, Owens' hope began to falter (that is as long as most patients survive in such crises), but he relieved Reynolds and went on squeezing.

After an hour, the Miracle Man began to breathe, faintly and slowly. Twenty-two long minutes later, Owens felt a movement in the heart. He took his hand away, slowly and tentatively. The heart kept on beating. He felt for the pulse. It was good. The man was alive again. Dr. Owens hurriedly sewed up the chest and rushed the patient to an oxygen tent.

One Little Word. That evening he asked the patient: "How're you feeling?" The man answered simply, "Sick." But that was enough to show that he was coming along. Within two days, the Miracle Man was out of bed. Says Dr. Owens: "If he had been a normal, not a mental, patient, we could have discharged him from the hospital soon after that. He was eating well. He was strong. There was absolutely no infection." The patient still has his artery trouble, but the doctors are not likely to tempt fate again by trying to correct it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.