Restarting a Heart: How Emergency Responders Saved an OKC Man

Feb. 19--Rita Houston awoke that December night to a sound she would later learn is called a "death rattle."

It's the gurgling sound her husband, Don Houston, was making as he lie in bed next to her. Hours before, he had been awake, eating grapes and reading a Louis L'Amour western novel as Rita Houston fell asleep.

But when she called 911, Rita Houston told the dispatcher her husband wouldn't wake up. The dispatcher told her to pull her husband off the bed and get him to the floor to begin CPR.

The 5-foot-2-inch woman cried out to God countless times, pleading for the physical strength to move her husband, who was about 70 pounds heavier than her, off the bed.

As the dispatcher explained how Rita Houston needed to push on Don's chest, she uttered, "I think he died, sir."

Moments later, a team of emergency medical professionals were in Don and Rita Houston's home, helping to save Don's life.

Survival rates

In 2012, Don Houston was one of 33 people in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City metro areas who survived after suffering from sudden cardiac arrest, when a person's heart stops unexpectedly, and blood stops flowing to the brain and other vital organs, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Dr. Jeffrey Goodloe, medical director of the emergency medical system in the Tulsa and OKC metro area, said the EMS system for the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metro areas recently learned from an analysis of its own statistics that it had a survival rate of 45 percent in 2012 for people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest outside of the hospital setting and have a bystander who provided CPR until emergency professionals arrive at the scene.

The region had one of the highest survival rates in the nation in 2012, he said. Among the 33 people who survived, 31 of them survived without major brain damage.

"It's all the more rewarding when you realize that this is a system that, for a little over a decade, has earned a reputation for performing very, very well in some of the most serious medical conditions that can occur outside the hospital setting," Goodloe said. "The real challenge for EMS systems that begin to achieving excellent clinical results is not just staying at that performance level but further advancing that performance level."

One of the reasons that rate is so high, medical officials say, is because of how much the emergency medical system leaders have focused on ensuring that paramedics, EMTs and firefighters consistently are trained on the fundamentals of CPR.

Also, when they arrive at a scene, they've been trained to work largely as a team, cutting down on the chaos that can ensue when medical help arrives.

When EMT Carey Crump, paramedic Frankie Burch and a team of emergency medical professionals walked through the Houstons' front door, Don Houston lay on his bedroom floor unconscious. At that point, he was considered clinically dead.

Crump and the others moved Don Houston into the living room, where there was enough room to work on him. They started CPR and taking other measures as Don Houston lay next to the family's Christmas tree, presents next to him. It was a week before Christmas.

Meanwhile, Rita Houston stood by, watching strangers try to save her husband.

In the moment, when Crump is saving someone's life, she doesn't think about those details. But when the adrenaline began to wear off, she does.

"There's a part of me where I know I have to do something that's my job, and there's the part of me thinking 'That's her best friend, that's a family member,' and you do everything you can help save him," Crump said.

Crump worked with with Burch and the Oklahoma City firefighters who arrived on the scene to save Don Houston's life. They rotated jobs, each taking turns delivering the chest compressions that someone performs while giving CPR.

"The heart is not beating, and you're beating for it -- that's what the chest compressions are for," Crump said.

Crump and the others kept performing CPR on Don Houston until his heart reached a "shockable rhythm," meaning it has enough activity to respond to the shock from a defibrillator, a device that gives a shock to the heart, according to the American Heart Association.

Sometimes a person's heart is not beating at all, so it can't be shocked. But if a person's heart is fluttering, it sometimes can be shocked to bring it back to a normal and healthy rhythm, she said.

The first time they used the defibrillator, they did not get a quiver from Don Houston's heart. Or the second. But the third time, there it was. His pulse returned, and they were able to transfer him to a nearby hospital.

"We have so much technology here and so many advanced pieces of equipment and different things we are given to use, and we've trained countless hours of trained on this stuff, and it worked," Crump said.

"We used everything we had. We shocked him three times, and that third shock got it."

Copyright 2014 - The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City