Eddie Rinehart, Austin, TX – 39 at time of event (2008)
Eddie had no idea it would be so important. He just decided on a whim to drive to the club and use the treadmill for his morning run. Normally he pounded the neighborhood streets around 5:30am. Not that spring day.
“I was five minutes into the run and I felt really weird. I was light headed. The last memory I have is that I was moving my hand to slow down the treadmill,” Eddie said. “The next memory I have is being wheeled out of the gym on a stretcher with the paramedics at my side.”
Eddie had fallen off the treadmill and gashed his head open. He was lucky to have had two gym members rush to his aid. One was a plastic surgeon who’d just completed his CPR refresher the day before, and the other a dentist. CPR was begun and the AED fetched and used promptly. Three shocks and he was awake.
Eddie of course knows none of this. He started to apologize to everyone for all the fuss, thinking he’d just fainted and banged his head. It was when he saw the helicopter that it dawned on him that it might be serious. And seeing Cathy, his wife, running up the driveway confirmed it. He must have been out for some time, because she had been asleep in bed when he went for the run.
“The first miracle of the day was NOT to go running in the neighborhood, but to go to the gym, which clearly saved my life!” Eddie exclaimed, “And then having people there with the knowledge to act, and having an AED on site as well.”
Eddie was rushed into the cath lab for an angiogram to located the source of his cardiac arrrest. Unfortunately, several arteries appeared blocked, and he was suddenly a candidate for bypass surgery. This was a bit unexpected and some discussion ensued as to which hospital would be best. Here we arrive at the second significant decision.
“They admitted me to the [trauma] hospital and I was scheduled for a triple bypass. We visited with the surgeon and decided at that point to transfer to the heart hospital in Austin, which was more specialized,” Eddie recalled.
This was a fortuitous decision, because the heart hospital had an intravascular scope* which has greater clarity and resolution to a normal angiogram.
“They actually prepped me for the open heart surgery and just stopped off to have this heart cath done on the way to the operating room,” Eddie explained. “The cardiologist looked and looked [at the results] and said ‘You don’t have a blockage at all! Your arteries just take a funny turn and on an angiogram it might look like it but with this clearer picture you don’t.”
“That was my second miracle of the day. I literally was en-route to have a triple bypass completely unnecessarily!” Eddie cried.
Instead, he underwent an EP study to determine the source of his deadly arrhythmia. They could not get his heart to duplicate what had occurred on the treadmill, but decided to implant an ICD to protect him if it ever happened again. Cathy had insisted he not leave the hospital without one!
“I look at my two little girls differently. Each day I have with them now truly feels like a blessing and a gift,” Eddie said with conviction.
Eddie also believes in the responsibility we all have to know what to do.
“We are such a small minority,” Eddie says of the survivor “family” he now belongs to. “Something must be done,” he stated emphatically, “to empower people to act! We just can’t stand by, or call 9-1-1 and do nothing.”
-Jeremy Whitehead
*Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a specialized imaging technique where a miniaturized ultrasound probe is attached to the end of the catheter to view the inside of blood vessels. It is especially useful for visualizing plaque.