Stephen Woodcock, Kokomo, IN – 62 at time of event (2009)
After their normal Saturday breakfast out, Steve decided to get a quick bike ride in before they sat down to watch the Kentucky Derby. Diane was preparing for the race when the door bell rang. She was expecting Steve back, but it was the Sheriff’s deputy at the door, with bad news. Steve had had an accident and was at the hospital. Diane wasn’t overly worried since he’d had many scrapes before. Just one of the downsides to regularly riding a push bike 100 miles on highways.
“People like to hit him!” Diane sad in all seriousness. “It’s happened before so I thought ‘Well someone’s hit him, Steve’s fallen down, something’s happened. Broken leg, broken arm, we can deal with this.”
Once at the hospital Diane realized this was no ordinary fall from the bike. She was taken through the ER to a “compassion room”. She was informed that Steve hadn’t been in an accident; he’d had a heart attack.
“It couldn’t be, Steve is healthy and his cholesterol is back to normal,” Diane said to the doctors. They led her to the trauma room where Steve was resisting the efforts of the medical staff. He didn’t like the IV drips, nor the ambu-bag* over his face. This was a tremendous shock for Diane and she needed to sit down. However the doctors wanted to immediately take Steve into the cath lab for emergency angioplasty.
“I had no idea what a cath lab was! As they were rushing him off, I realized I had to call my daughters but I didn’t have their phone numbers,” Diane recalled. “I wanted to drive home and contact them, but the nurses wouldn’t let me. They said I was in shock, and instead had me wait with the chaplain.”
Steve had five blockages, two were repaired with stents but the other three had auto bypassed. His high level of fitness caused his heart to grow new vessels to reroute around the blocked arteries. Steve spent nearly twenty days unconscious in ICU; his ribs and sternum were damaged plus pulmonary issues from the vigorous CPR. He also underwent a blood transfusion and other complications. Oh, and he had a broken collarbone from the fall off the bike!
“He had tubes running out of every part of his body! I couldn’t handle it,” Diane said. Also, his face was battered and there were bruises all over his legs and hip. Finally, one of her many visits to the ICU had a result.
“The day he came back to life I walked in and he was was sitting up in bed with a phone book!” Diane exclaimed. “He was trying to find out where things were. He couldn’t remember. Earlier he’d asked the doctor who I was, and then said ‘I think she’s someone I care about’. ”
After the ICD implant Steve spent another two weeks in rehabilitation. His cognitive abilities were affected as well as speech and memory issues.
“For about a week afterwards he didn’t know where he lived. He thought we lived in California, where we lived before. In fact, he told me every address we’d ever lived in [their 41 years of marriage],” Diane explained. However, they had only been in Kokomo for eight months. Exactly one month later Steve went home, and they are both trying to adjust.
If not for a family seeing him fall on Highway 26 outside their home, Steve might not have made it. They had called 9-1-1 and started CPR. A nurse and two EMTs passing by also stopped to assist before the ambulance arrived.
“I’m scared to death I’m going to lose him. At night I’ll wake up and start poking at him to make sure he’s still alive,” Diane says with a laugh. “He says ‘Oh goodness leave me alone woman!’ But he’s always spoiled me rotten, taken care of me when I’ve been sick, and he’s never been in hospital [before], he’s never sick. It absolutely threw me for a loop!”
-Jeremy Whitehead
* Ambu-bag is a trademark term used for a self-reinflating bag used during resuscitation. It includes a non-rebreathing valve connected to a face mask or endotracheal tube and is used for manual artificial ventilation