Tell us about what happened to Carolyn the day of her SCA.

My wife Carolyn and I had recently married and had moved from Australia to Boston, where at the time she was working for IBM. She had a business trip in Dallas shortly after we were married. During her trip, I received a phone call from her boss saying she ‘had had a bit of a turn’ and that they had sent her off to the hospital — he was understating things severely. What had happened is that while at her business conference, after just having introduced herself to everyone in the room and sitting down, she collapsed to the ground. Luckily, two male colleagues helped her immediately as well as a nurse attending the conference center.

It took the EMTs about 19 minutes to bring Carolyn back. They then took her to the ER, where she crashed again. I arrived hours later — IBM flew me to Dallas. All the hospital could tell me was that she had been admitted for cardiac arrest but they weren’t sure if she had maybe suffered an aneurysm. This terrified me. Later they found that it wasn’t an aneurysm that caused her to collapse, so they also sent her for an angiogram, which came back clear. After this the doctors figured it was an electrical problem with her heart, so they sent her to the electrophysiology lab. She spent a couple of hours in the EP lab, and although they couldn’t locate the problem, they also said they couldn’t release her from the hospital unless she was implanted with an ICD. During the time that she was in intensive care, I was asking a lot of questions — I felt powerless. I describe a lot of this in the book — it’s really what the whole book is about. One of the things I noticed is that the physicians approached cases such as Carolyn’s from a very clinical and scientific point of view, while the nurses were much more attuned to the patients and family; for instance, the nurses were talking to Carolyn as though she was fully awake, even though she could not see or talk. In addition, the doctors would talk about her as being in a coma, while the nurses talked about her simply being sedated, which is much easier to hear during such a traumatic time. Therefore, I would ask the nurses lots of questions, such as why are you sedating her and why is she intubated? I had also been watching the monitor and saw her breathing at 17 respirations per minute, and yet the machine was set on 12 breaths, so the extra 5 were coming from her. Eventually they agreed to extubate her. I must say that dealing with the insurance companies was also quite a funny experience, since I had never heard of an HMO or PCPs before in my life!

Did Carolyn receive an ICD? What was that experience like?