Montgomery TX Police Dept AED Fund
Donation protected
This is the story of Bill Webb and the miraculous chain of events that saved his life. He's my dad. I got the call from my mom on Friday, April 8, 2016, telling me something had happened to dad on his bicycle, maybe a heart attack, and she didn't know more. The "more" of the story is where God comes in. God and an automatic external defibrillator (AED) that showed up on the shoulder of a Texas highway by chance.
Dad is a 64-year old retired Methodist minister, and his hobby is long-distance cycling. He was preparing to ride his third MS150 to raise money for multiple sclerosis. He rode 10 miles on his bicycle that day near their home in Montgomery, Texas (that’s actually a pretty short ride for him, mom wonders if he felt bad and was coming back early). Around 9:30am he suddenly fell over on the side of Highway 105 (a two-lane highway northwest of Houston) right in front of the cowboy church, about 3 miles from home. Someone saw him fall and called 911. Just as the call came through on the police radio, three different officers from three different agencies, two of whom would not hear the 911 dispatch anyway, were driving by, saw him, and stopped to help. They told us by all definitions, he was dead—no pulse, blue, not breathing. Down maybe one or two minutes by now. County Constable Tim Shackleford started CPR, joined by Montgomery school district security officer, Todd Barrow. The Montgomery Police Chief Jim Napalitano saw the flashing lights, pulled over, and directed traffic to keep things open for the ambulance. CPR wasn’t working. He would take a breath after a minute of CPR but then stop again. The school district officer had an automatic defibrillator or AED (no one else present at that point had one), and hooked it up. He was in ventricular tachycardia (v-tach)—an arrythmia that does not provide sufficient blood flow to the body for survival if it goes on too long. They shocked him twice with the AED and got a pulse again. The ambulance arrived and raced away. The police have all told us individually that they did not think he would survive. They gathered his bike and helmet, glasses and water bottles from the side of the highway for a “DOA”. Really hard to type that. He had forgotten his wallet, which he never does, and had no ID. One of the officers happened to ride bikes and knew that serious cyclists engrave their drivers license number on their pedal. There it was. They identified him by that alone, and left to find my mom.
The police showed up at Mom’s door while she was making plans for errands that day. She says the doorbell will haunt her forever now. She had heard all the sirens going by, could have watched the ambulance from her kitchen window, and here they stood. It can't be good.
In the ambulance and the ER, he was shocked at least 7 more times. A medication was given that finally stopped his v-tach. He was rushed to the cath lab to look at blood flow to the heart, before my mom even got to the hospital. They stented a 90% blockage in a major coronary artery (the blood vessels that supply the heart itself with blood flow). He was on 4 continuous medications to keep his blood pressure up—it would drop rapidly even when they just swapped out a bag of medicine. He had a swollen right temple and black eye and some scattered bruises. He was not stable enough for a CT of the head. My husband and I had our two kids in the car back home in Oklahoma City, buckled in their seats and ready to make the trip, when my cousin called me, said I needed to get a flight and get there now. I didn’t have time to drive. I got a ticket. My husband dropped me at the airport and drove off towards Houston with the kids.
By the time I arrived at 7pm, 9 hours after the event, he was chewing on the breathing tube and occasionally opening his eyes a little. I was elated to hear this. See, I'm a physician. When you are a doctor and your family member is this critical, you suddenly know too much. Your brain is processing the medical information as fast as it can. It is leaving your heart to catch up every few minutes and bring you back to reality of what this means to who you are in THIS room, not what you do in those other rooms with patients who are not your dad. I had not even thought he’d survive based on the information I had, and after prolonged CPR I knew the odds that he was “in there” were low. But chewing on the tube means the brain is alert enough to know that the tube was bothering him. He had a gag reflex. This was monumental to me, but I couldn’t explain that well to my family—I didn’t want to raise their hopes or confuse them with brainstem/cortical function info…my brain was working too slow and too fast all at once.
The next morning I walked in, and he was trying to grab his tubes and lifting his head. I’ve never been happier to ask a nurse for more sedation (to keep him from yanking things out while he was not aware of what he’s doing). He weaned off the blood pressure support medications over 4 days and off the ventilator breathing machine and the tube was removed on the sixth morning. He was following commands and recognized us, mouthed “I love you”, CT of the brain was finally done and was completely normal. By day seven, he was tired and weak, but talking to us and trying to grasp what had happened. He had some amnesia--both of the event and of some other pieces of the past few years, random things he can't remember at all, like the fact he drives a school bus (he loves that job, had wanted to retire and drive a school bus for years; we thought he was kidding back then, but he wasn't). He remembers people though, even ones we haven’t seen in a long, long time. He asked what happened and we told him he had a heart attack on his bike, and he looked at us like we were crazy. “Heart attack?! Me??” He asks questions and we answer. We told him he got CPR by police officers and he started to cry, said we have to go thank them. See, Dad was a volunteer fireman and First Responder for years. He's done on-site CPR multiple times. He knows what that looks like. Of course we already have thanked them, contacted all of them. Someone from church even baked them cookies. Dad listened, dumbfounded, as I told him a simplified version of the whole story and then he cried, and hugged us all, and thanked God. A few hours later, he asked me again what happened, and I said, “Remember? You had a heart attack,” and he looked shocked again and said "I had a heart attack?” The events that took place need repeating every so often, but the seriousness of how sick he’s been is sinking in, and he knows he is lucky to be here. His memory will get better with time.
We went by the police station and picked up his things, not a DOA after all, but alive and eating eggs for breakfast. His helmet has a huge crack in it. Another life saver in a string of life savers. It's now day 11 since the beginning of this, and he’s standing up and walking a little with physical therapy, bored to tears with staying in bed, and asking if he will be able to ride his beloved bicycle again. He’ll be getting a lot of therapy in the next few weeks to months—physical and cognitive. But he had another chance to tell my brother Kyle and me he was proud of us. And he asks for mom whenever she is not in the room. And he still loves Aggies and Astros and grandkids. Sometimes he just stares off, takes a deep breath, holding back tears and shakes his head. He still can’t believe he’s in the hospital and he'll probably ask us why again, but we don't mind.
Nearly 80 people had visited over the first week, most from their church, Montgomery First United Methodist. He can’t believe that either. “They all came to see me?” We bonded with some of the other families in the waiting room, some who came in when we did, some whose family member didn’t make it, some who’ve been “living” there for weeks. A man we met in the waiting room whose wife had a stroke said he is coming to visit the church soon because he has been amazed at how they have cared for our family through this. We slept in the waiting room, on 4-seat benches that had a wooden armrest right in the middle that prevented you from ever being comfortable. My uncle, two aunts, brother, mom and I all took turns sleeping there so he was never alone. Aunt Dell wrote an amazing poem at 2am about this journey. I wrote a pitiful haiku about how much I hate wooden armrests. I thought about all the times Dad spent the night sleeping in chairs at hospitals with sick and dying members of his churches, and sometimes with people he barely knew, so they would not be alone. I got over the armrest issue. We ate meals brought by church members, every single meal covered. We cried and laughed as a family: aunts, uncles, cousins, 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins. We bawled when he smiled at us, and laughed when we heard his first little chuckle at a joke his brother told. He wants someone’s hand to hold most of the time. He wants Diet Dr Pepper. He wants to know if he can ride his bike again. I am so blessed and amazed at this whole experience, God is good.
**So here we are: the point of this whole long story.**
If Officer Shackleford hadn't started CPR so quickly, and if Officer Barrow, the school district officer, hadn’t happened by, hadn’t stopped, we probably would have lost him. Barrow was not going to get the 911 call on his radio. He was the only one with an AED. He pulled up in his car to save my dad because God put him there. They had a pulse before the ambulance arrived, which wouldn’t have happened without the AED.
We have learned that the Montgomery Police Department vehicles do NOT have AEDs. And we think they should.
AEDs cost about $1600 each. Our family is trying to raise $8000 or more to donate five or more AEDs to the Montgomery Police Department. Because next time it will be somebody else's dad, and they deserve a miracle too. All funds collected will go directly to the purchase of automatic external defibrillators and necessary accessories. Any and all leftover funds will be donated directly to the American Heart Association.
I’m a different person after this. I'm a pediatric hospitalist--I've taken care of hospitalized children for ten years. I don’t throw “medical miracle” around much, don’t really believe in them honestly, because I have seen so many people who deserved a “miracle" and didn’t get it. I know that my work as a physician is guided by God, but saving someone from dying, and saving a family as someone dies, are both miracles of their own kind. I know God has plans, and sometimes his plans are the same as ours, and sometimes they aren’t, and we don’t get to see the "big picture plan" that makes the difference. But I think Dad's survival, alert and intact 6 days later, with near normal heart function after being found “dead” and being “down for one and a half hours”, is a true miracle, made up of him falling after 10 miles on country highways, right there 1/8 mile from the police station, all the right people in all the right places, a helmet that worked, a defibrillator that showed up against the odds, and a cyclist cop who found his identification so Mom didn’t wait hours to find out what had happened. It is all God, and we have work to do to spread the word.
Update April 25, 2016
Dad is home! He was released from rehab yesterday and is settling in at home. He is still getting physical and cognitive therapy, has some memory loss of things in the past, both some recent and some a few years back, but it's getting better and better. He is so grateful for all the prayers and donations and visitors and support for our family through all of this. It's wonderful to see him take it all in, and I know he can't wait to give back.
Thank you!!
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
We got his bicycle helmet out of the police evidence lockbox, cracked and dented. I held it in my lap, and the words that came to mind were “armor of God”. In the Message version of the Bible, that verse goes like this:
Ephesians 6:10-12 (MSG)
"God is strong, and he wants you strong. So take EVERYTHING the Master has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything the Devil throws your way. This is no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is FOR KEEPS, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels.”
For keeps.
Amen.
Love,
Rhonda, Kyle and Shannon
Dad is a 64-year old retired Methodist minister, and his hobby is long-distance cycling. He was preparing to ride his third MS150 to raise money for multiple sclerosis. He rode 10 miles on his bicycle that day near their home in Montgomery, Texas (that’s actually a pretty short ride for him, mom wonders if he felt bad and was coming back early). Around 9:30am he suddenly fell over on the side of Highway 105 (a two-lane highway northwest of Houston) right in front of the cowboy church, about 3 miles from home. Someone saw him fall and called 911. Just as the call came through on the police radio, three different officers from three different agencies, two of whom would not hear the 911 dispatch anyway, were driving by, saw him, and stopped to help. They told us by all definitions, he was dead—no pulse, blue, not breathing. Down maybe one or two minutes by now. County Constable Tim Shackleford started CPR, joined by Montgomery school district security officer, Todd Barrow. The Montgomery Police Chief Jim Napalitano saw the flashing lights, pulled over, and directed traffic to keep things open for the ambulance. CPR wasn’t working. He would take a breath after a minute of CPR but then stop again. The school district officer had an automatic defibrillator or AED (no one else present at that point had one), and hooked it up. He was in ventricular tachycardia (v-tach)—an arrythmia that does not provide sufficient blood flow to the body for survival if it goes on too long. They shocked him twice with the AED and got a pulse again. The ambulance arrived and raced away. The police have all told us individually that they did not think he would survive. They gathered his bike and helmet, glasses and water bottles from the side of the highway for a “DOA”. Really hard to type that. He had forgotten his wallet, which he never does, and had no ID. One of the officers happened to ride bikes and knew that serious cyclists engrave their drivers license number on their pedal. There it was. They identified him by that alone, and left to find my mom.
The police showed up at Mom’s door while she was making plans for errands that day. She says the doorbell will haunt her forever now. She had heard all the sirens going by, could have watched the ambulance from her kitchen window, and here they stood. It can't be good.
In the ambulance and the ER, he was shocked at least 7 more times. A medication was given that finally stopped his v-tach. He was rushed to the cath lab to look at blood flow to the heart, before my mom even got to the hospital. They stented a 90% blockage in a major coronary artery (the blood vessels that supply the heart itself with blood flow). He was on 4 continuous medications to keep his blood pressure up—it would drop rapidly even when they just swapped out a bag of medicine. He had a swollen right temple and black eye and some scattered bruises. He was not stable enough for a CT of the head. My husband and I had our two kids in the car back home in Oklahoma City, buckled in their seats and ready to make the trip, when my cousin called me, said I needed to get a flight and get there now. I didn’t have time to drive. I got a ticket. My husband dropped me at the airport and drove off towards Houston with the kids.
By the time I arrived at 7pm, 9 hours after the event, he was chewing on the breathing tube and occasionally opening his eyes a little. I was elated to hear this. See, I'm a physician. When you are a doctor and your family member is this critical, you suddenly know too much. Your brain is processing the medical information as fast as it can. It is leaving your heart to catch up every few minutes and bring you back to reality of what this means to who you are in THIS room, not what you do in those other rooms with patients who are not your dad. I had not even thought he’d survive based on the information I had, and after prolonged CPR I knew the odds that he was “in there” were low. But chewing on the tube means the brain is alert enough to know that the tube was bothering him. He had a gag reflex. This was monumental to me, but I couldn’t explain that well to my family—I didn’t want to raise their hopes or confuse them with brainstem/cortical function info…my brain was working too slow and too fast all at once.
The next morning I walked in, and he was trying to grab his tubes and lifting his head. I’ve never been happier to ask a nurse for more sedation (to keep him from yanking things out while he was not aware of what he’s doing). He weaned off the blood pressure support medications over 4 days and off the ventilator breathing machine and the tube was removed on the sixth morning. He was following commands and recognized us, mouthed “I love you”, CT of the brain was finally done and was completely normal. By day seven, he was tired and weak, but talking to us and trying to grasp what had happened. He had some amnesia--both of the event and of some other pieces of the past few years, random things he can't remember at all, like the fact he drives a school bus (he loves that job, had wanted to retire and drive a school bus for years; we thought he was kidding back then, but he wasn't). He remembers people though, even ones we haven’t seen in a long, long time. He asked what happened and we told him he had a heart attack on his bike, and he looked at us like we were crazy. “Heart attack?! Me??” He asks questions and we answer. We told him he got CPR by police officers and he started to cry, said we have to go thank them. See, Dad was a volunteer fireman and First Responder for years. He's done on-site CPR multiple times. He knows what that looks like. Of course we already have thanked them, contacted all of them. Someone from church even baked them cookies. Dad listened, dumbfounded, as I told him a simplified version of the whole story and then he cried, and hugged us all, and thanked God. A few hours later, he asked me again what happened, and I said, “Remember? You had a heart attack,” and he looked shocked again and said "I had a heart attack?” The events that took place need repeating every so often, but the seriousness of how sick he’s been is sinking in, and he knows he is lucky to be here. His memory will get better with time.
We went by the police station and picked up his things, not a DOA after all, but alive and eating eggs for breakfast. His helmet has a huge crack in it. Another life saver in a string of life savers. It's now day 11 since the beginning of this, and he’s standing up and walking a little with physical therapy, bored to tears with staying in bed, and asking if he will be able to ride his beloved bicycle again. He’ll be getting a lot of therapy in the next few weeks to months—physical and cognitive. But he had another chance to tell my brother Kyle and me he was proud of us. And he asks for mom whenever she is not in the room. And he still loves Aggies and Astros and grandkids. Sometimes he just stares off, takes a deep breath, holding back tears and shakes his head. He still can’t believe he’s in the hospital and he'll probably ask us why again, but we don't mind.
Nearly 80 people had visited over the first week, most from their church, Montgomery First United Methodist. He can’t believe that either. “They all came to see me?” We bonded with some of the other families in the waiting room, some who came in when we did, some whose family member didn’t make it, some who’ve been “living” there for weeks. A man we met in the waiting room whose wife had a stroke said he is coming to visit the church soon because he has been amazed at how they have cared for our family through this. We slept in the waiting room, on 4-seat benches that had a wooden armrest right in the middle that prevented you from ever being comfortable. My uncle, two aunts, brother, mom and I all took turns sleeping there so he was never alone. Aunt Dell wrote an amazing poem at 2am about this journey. I wrote a pitiful haiku about how much I hate wooden armrests. I thought about all the times Dad spent the night sleeping in chairs at hospitals with sick and dying members of his churches, and sometimes with people he barely knew, so they would not be alone. I got over the armrest issue. We ate meals brought by church members, every single meal covered. We cried and laughed as a family: aunts, uncles, cousins, 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins. We bawled when he smiled at us, and laughed when we heard his first little chuckle at a joke his brother told. He wants someone’s hand to hold most of the time. He wants Diet Dr Pepper. He wants to know if he can ride his bike again. I am so blessed and amazed at this whole experience, God is good.
**So here we are: the point of this whole long story.**
If Officer Shackleford hadn't started CPR so quickly, and if Officer Barrow, the school district officer, hadn’t happened by, hadn’t stopped, we probably would have lost him. Barrow was not going to get the 911 call on his radio. He was the only one with an AED. He pulled up in his car to save my dad because God put him there. They had a pulse before the ambulance arrived, which wouldn’t have happened without the AED.
We have learned that the Montgomery Police Department vehicles do NOT have AEDs. And we think they should.
AEDs cost about $1600 each. Our family is trying to raise $8000 or more to donate five or more AEDs to the Montgomery Police Department. Because next time it will be somebody else's dad, and they deserve a miracle too. All funds collected will go directly to the purchase of automatic external defibrillators and necessary accessories. Any and all leftover funds will be donated directly to the American Heart Association.
I’m a different person after this. I'm a pediatric hospitalist--I've taken care of hospitalized children for ten years. I don’t throw “medical miracle” around much, don’t really believe in them honestly, because I have seen so many people who deserved a “miracle" and didn’t get it. I know that my work as a physician is guided by God, but saving someone from dying, and saving a family as someone dies, are both miracles of their own kind. I know God has plans, and sometimes his plans are the same as ours, and sometimes they aren’t, and we don’t get to see the "big picture plan" that makes the difference. But I think Dad's survival, alert and intact 6 days later, with near normal heart function after being found “dead” and being “down for one and a half hours”, is a true miracle, made up of him falling after 10 miles on country highways, right there 1/8 mile from the police station, all the right people in all the right places, a helmet that worked, a defibrillator that showed up against the odds, and a cyclist cop who found his identification so Mom didn’t wait hours to find out what had happened. It is all God, and we have work to do to spread the word.
Update April 25, 2016
Dad is home! He was released from rehab yesterday and is settling in at home. He is still getting physical and cognitive therapy, has some memory loss of things in the past, both some recent and some a few years back, but it's getting better and better. He is so grateful for all the prayers and donations and visitors and support for our family through all of this. It's wonderful to see him take it all in, and I know he can't wait to give back.
Thank you!!
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
We got his bicycle helmet out of the police evidence lockbox, cracked and dented. I held it in my lap, and the words that came to mind were “armor of God”. In the Message version of the Bible, that verse goes like this:
Ephesians 6:10-12 (MSG)
"God is strong, and he wants you strong. So take EVERYTHING the Master has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything the Devil throws your way. This is no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is FOR KEEPS, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels.”
For keeps.
Amen.
Love,
Rhonda, Kyle and Shannon
Organizer
Shannon Webb Kaneaster
Organizer
Montgomery, TX