A Heart to Serve by Bill Frist

Author:Bill Frist [FRIST, WILLIAM H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000
ISBN: 9781599951461
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2009-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, I WAS SUPPOSED TO FLY BACK TO NASHville for a midweek fundraising event and return to Washington the following day. I was running late, and I still had to go over to the Senate floor to vote. Perhaps it was providential.

Just about that time, Graeme Sieber, the director of a home for troubled boys in Cleveland, Tennessee, was visiting my colleague Fred Thompson and the Tennessee House members, lobbying them to reconsider budget cuts that would affect charities like his. Sieber had just gotten off the elevator outside the Dirksen office of Rhode Island senator John Chafee when he keeled over with a heart attack, falling partially in the elevator doorway and partially in the hallway. A woman staffer from Senator Chafee’s office raced around the corner to my office and called in to Ramona, “Is your boss here? I think a man in the hall has had a heart attack!”

Ramona burst into my office to inform me, and I grabbed an emergency medical kit I kept in my closet, rushed down the hall, and pushed through a small crowd in front of the elevator. I found a man ashen gray on the floor, his head in a pool of blood. Had he been shot? No, I found a gash in his scalp, resulting, I concluded, from his fall to the hard marble floor.

Chafee’s office manager had been a Girl Scout leader, and she had already begun administering CPR before I arrived. I dropped to my knees, felt the patient’s neck for a pulse, and immediately cleared his airway and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Can someone else give her a hand in compressing the chest?” I said, looking up between breaths, knowing the woman would soon grow tired. “Has someone called 911?” I knew it’d be impossible to get him back without a defibrillator. I was worried because it had been several minutes since the man on the floor had passed out. I checked his carotid pulse again and felt nothing—a bad sign. I made a fist and delivered a strong thump to the chest—nothing. I had grabbed an airway tube from my emergency kit. I inserted the clear plastic tube down his windpipe to force air into his lungs, attached the big black air “ambu” bag, and instructed a bystander to squeeze it once every five seconds. I knew if we didn’t get him turned around quickly he would die.

The on-call doctor from the Capitol Physician’s Office arrived with a heart defibrillator. I stripped open the man’s shirt, slapped on the sticky electrode pads, and read the wildly irregular electrical activity on the screen as ventricular fibrillation (which is incompatible with life). We shocked the patient once…his body jerked into the air. No pulse. Twice, nothing…I glanced up at the clock, thinking maybe it had taken too long to begin CPR. I thought for sure that he was gone. Then I turned up the power on the defibrillator and shocked him once again. Suddenly, his heart kicked back into a regular, normal sinus rhythm.

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