23
His Heart Stopped on Valentine’s Day
After Jeff Buchanan suffered a massive coronary, the restoration God granted was surprising and far-reaching.
Monday is pizza night around the Buchanan house, and February 14, 2011, was no exception. But on this day, before the family of five dug into the goods from Little Caesar’s, Jeff called his wife, Erica, and their three daughters—Aubrey, fourteen, Emily, ten, and Haley, six—into the kitchen of their Oklahoma City home. He handed each a small bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates decorated with a handwritten note and a paper heart cutout.
After dinner, Erica, retreating to the home office to handle a few things, had to smile at the laughter coming from the other room, where the kids had engaged Jeff in a tickling match. At one point Haley, happy and breathless, ran in and grabbed her mother’s phone. “I want to take a picture!” she announced, and Erica barely had time to nod permission before the girl disappeared.
The couple had met nine years earlier when they each returned to college as adults. Erica knew immediately there was something genuine about this kind and charming big bear of a man, and her two daughters—then one and five—seemed to feel the same way. Jeff and Erica married and, two years later, welcomed Haley.
Now this wife and mother couldn’t think of a lovelier way to spend Valentine’s Day than sharing pizza with her boisterous, happy family.
Twenty minutes after seeing the girls to bed, Erica was wrapping up in the office and getting ready to join her husband when she heard him call from the bedroom. He said one word, “Babe,” and she knew something was wrong.
Running in she saw Jeff lying sideways across the bed, gasping for air and speechless. She called 9-1-1, then looked up and saw Aubrey and Emily, wide-eyed and scared, in the doorway. “Go get the neighbors!” she instructed.
Casey and Amber, friends next door, arrived the same time as the EMTs. A paramedic told Amber to keep Erica and the girls in the kitchen while they wheeled Jeff on a stretcher through the living room.
Tears streaming down her face, Erica begged, “What’s going on? Why can’t I see him?”
Amber said gently, “Erica, he’s not breathing. They can’t find a pulse. They don’t want you or the girls to see him this way.”
Don Payne, a nurse, showed up as usual around 6:30 AM Tuesday at Oklahoma Heart Hospital. As he rounded the corner into the CCU and glanced into Room 220, he could tell by the machines and family members’ demeanor that the guy was in bad shape. But he was used to that—this was the critical care unit, after all—so it wasn’t a shocker until the night nurse handed over his shift report. Regarding this patient he said, “Post-cardiac arrest. Big chill. He’s probably not going to make it, and he’s thirty-nine.”
Then it hit him like a punch in the gut: Don had turned thirty-eight last October, his best friend had died of a heart attack at thirty-seven, and his father had died of cancer at forty-one. Sometimes he felt he was approaching the age when he was living on borrowed time, and here he was, facing a patient his age who was teetering between life and death.
He reviewed his patient’s history.
Jeff Buchanan had been admitted after going into sudden cardiac arrest. For an hour and a half he didn’t respond to medicine or CPR. He received electrical shocks to his heart twenty times to no avail. Doctors told his family it didn’t look good, but that because he was so young they were going to try everything—CPR, meds, shock paddles—once more before calling it quits.
This time the guy’s heart started. It wasn’t stable, it wasn’t pretty, but it was enough to move him into CCU.
At that point he’d gone an estimated fifteen minutes without any blood or oxygen to the brain and ninety minutes without a natural heartbeat. It was expected that he would be a vegetable for the rest of his life. Doctors told the man’s sobbing wife and family they wanted to take him into what they called “The Big Chill,” bringing his body temp to 91 degrees—into a hypothermic state—to minimize brain damage.
In this fairly new approach, the patient would be sedated so as not to wake during the three-day process, wherein he would remain in a coma and paralyzed so his body could rest and focus on stabilizing his heart and brain. Until the doctors warmed him back up, his family would not be allowed to talk to him or touch him. You didn’t want to do anything to stimulate a patient in a big chill. You didn’t want him to wake up. Not yet.
By 6:00 AM Tuesday Erica was spent. All night long, doctors and nurses had expected that any moment would be Jeff’s last. He was on eighteen drip medications and swimming in a sea of tubes and machines. His liver and his kidneys had stopped working. Just when she thought she’d cried every last tear, she picked up her phone and opened her photo gallery. There was one of Jeff tickling Emily, taken less than an hour before he’d cried out for help. It was the picture Haley had snapped when she’d borrowed the phone. Had they really been so blissfully happy just a few short hours ago? Staring at the snapshot, Erica dissolved into yet another rising tide of tears.
Soon the waiting room was filled with praying friends and family. The hallways were packed. There was even a group of committed friends praying on the sidewalk several floors beneath Jeff’s window.
Erica’s best friend, Allyson, rarely left her side. Allyson knew she’d never seen anyone so scared, so shaken, or so desperate. The women prayed together throughout the early morning hours.
The doctors told Erica they didn’t think Jeff would recover and that if he did he’d have no brain function. Each time they brought bad news, she would say, “Okay, what are the top three things we need to be praying for right now?” Then she’d use Facebook and Twitter to broadcast the requests.
Throughout Wednesday, Don monitored Jeff’s blood pressure, blood glucose, potassium, and heart rhythm. All levels were either dangerously high or dangerously low, and it was a balancing act between life and death trying to get everything shifted to within a safe range.
Jeff had been in hypothermia twenty-four hours; it was time, over the next twelve, to warm him back up. Once his temperature was normal, they would try to wake him. That’s when they would know the extent of his brain damage.
Don had expected that friends and family would arrive to show their support or pray. But he was surprised by the number of people who came and how boldly they asked God to heal Jeff. They seemed to expect it to happen.
This was a bittersweet reminder of what Don once had in his own life. Not that long ago he’d been involved in a loving church family and had enjoyed such deeply committed relationships. But as he’d often said, he had placed too much faith in people and not enough in God. Disappointed by certain circumstances within the church, he had slipped away.
Now seeing the love and support poured out on the Buchanans, he felt a stirring in his heart. He missed this love, this kinship. This dependence on God. This vital, active, living faith.
He asked Erica where they attended. When she said, “Life Church, in Edmond,” he was surprised. It was a big church. How had they developed such intimate friendships in a congregation of that size?
As he pondered, in his spirit he felt a whispered answer, loving but full of truth: “Don, stop underestimating me. Haven’t you learned yet that your preconceived ideas about how I work aren’t always true?”
He headed home after his shift. He’d settled into his recliner when he got a text: “Just coded 220.”
Jeff’s heart had stopped.
Erica had been in the waiting room with others when she heard through hallway speakers a code blue call for 220. Immediately she and other family members started running toward Jeff’s room. There they could see doctors and nurses working fast and efficiently to try to restart his heart. Erica collapsed.
Within several minutes the medical team had his heart started and stabilized. Attention turned to Erica. Allyson and a nurse got her into a chair, and Allyson urged, “Stay strong. Jeff needs you.” Then she ran to tell everyone Jeff was stable but to keep praying.
Around midnight his temp was normal. It was time to try waking him up.
Now something suddenly snapped for Erica. Before, she’d been fighting for her husband, yet she’d also been sorrowful and afraid. Now she was fightin’ mad! She told her family, “I’m done. I’m seriously done. The devil is not going to win this battle!”
She went to her husband’s side and said, “Jeff, I’m here.”
He turned his head and tried to open his eyes.
“He’s in there. He’s in there!” she said, and she was flooded with peace.
Things happened quickly. A nurse asked, “Can you raise your eyebrow?”
He did.
Questions came faster. “Wiggle your toes? Squeeze my hand?”
Jeff kept responding.
“Wink one eye? Lift your arm?”
Now he was starting to show off. At one point the man who’d been pretty much declared brain dead gave two thumbs-up.
All through the night and into the morning, family and friends took turns filing in every few hours to watch in amazement as he continued to respond to prompts from the nursing staff.
Later in the morning his neurologist told Erica, “We’re going to take scans and see what kind of brain damage he has.”
She answered, “I understand you need to run those tests, Doctor, but I want you to know that God’s in control and my husband is fine.”
Don was supposed to have Thursday off. Instead he asked to come in to work. This was going to be a big day for Jeff, and he wanted to be there.
Jeff was scheduled for CT brain scans, so he’d have to be taken off the ventilator. Don would force air into his lungs by manually squeezing a bag. But he was shocked when, off the ventilator, Jeff was breathing on his own.
That night the scans came back completely normal. Jeff had no brain damage whatsoever.
By Saturday he was sitting in a recliner, eating ice chips and Jell-O.
He went home March 2, just over two weeks after his heart stopped. A pacemaker/defibrillator went with him, and his only residual issue is the need to take a daily supplement for kidneys that no longer retain magnesium.
But the residual blessings . . . ah, that’s another story.
As Erica continued to post updates, reports flooded in from families and individuals whose faith had been revitalized through Jeff’s ordeal. Moms and dads watched their kids’ faith grow after they prayed and then read subsequent posts announcing God’s intervention. People of all ages were saying, “I helped pray about that and God answered!”
As stories emerged from all over the nation, Erica, Aubrey, Emily, and Haley began to turn their focus from what God was doing for Jeff to what he was doing for other people through Jeff.
Not that they’ve had to look very far.
Don’s a regular at Life Church now and has become a good friend of the Buchanans. He says he knows that God still does miracles and that Jeff’s not the only one whose life got jump-started.