Pa. Man Beats Odds, Survives `Widow Maker` Heart Attack

Jan. 02--For many years the roar of a medical helicopter leaving Allegheny Valley Hospital, mere yards from her Pleasantville Road home, didn't faze Bonnie Fennell.

Now when she hears a helicopter depart, it stops her in her tracks. The buzz of the chopper's blades takes her back to that October day when she watched helplessly from her front steps as another medical helicopter left the hospital.

That helicopter was carrying her 52-year-old husband, Allen. Minutes earlier he had to be revived multiple times, after suffering a type of heart attack known to doctors as "the widow maker."

"The widow maker" kills 80 percent of the people it strikes.

Because of the actions of Bonnie and the doctors and nurses who treated him, Allen's alive to talk about that day.

Like any other morning

The morning of Oct. 26 started like most mornings for the Fennells.

Bonnie and Allen woke up, got ready for work and ate breakfast. Everything was moving along until Allen did his morning ritual of checking his blood pressure.

"My blood pressure was very high," he said, sitting next to Bonnie on a couch in the family's living room. "It was something like 200 over 100. Then I started sweating."

Sweating like he had just run a marathon.

"I told him to go lay down on the bed and put a cold towel on his head," Bonnie said. "I went into the bedroom and told him I was going to call an ambulance.

"That's when he said to me, 'I don't think I have time.' "

Immediately, Bonnie ran for her keys.

"My heart felt like it was jumping out of my chest," Allen said.

The Fennells raced out of the house and to the driveway, but when Bonnie arrived at the driver's side door of her car, Allen was nowhere to be found.

"I ran to the other side of the car and he was on his knees," she said. " I pushed him into the car."

Bonnie rushed Allen up the winding, half-mile stretch of Pleasantville Road to AVH.

Pulling up to the emergency room door, Bonnie knew she needed help immediately.

"I told him I'd be right back," she said. "He looked at me and said, 'Babe, hurry.' "

When Bonnie returned with a team of doctors and nurses, Allen was slumped over in the passenger seat, stiff as a board, holding his chest.

He was in cardiac arrest.

Saving a life -- over and over

"If you don't have circulation in the first 20 minutes of trying to resuscitate someone, there's not much hope," said Dr. Jerry Taylor, the emergency room doctor who treated Allen when he got to AVH.

Taylor and a team of five nurses worked on Allen for more than 45 minutes, because Allen was different.

"He kept waking during CPR," Taylor said. "We knew he could be resuscitated."

Taylor said Allen's heart had to be shocked back into rhythm more than

30 times -- something that seldom ends with good results.

"Usually, when someone is shocked that much, they have brain damage," he said. "Mr. Fennell was an unusual case."

"I'm just glad he (Taylor) didn't give up on me," Allen said. "It would have been really easy for them to think I was a lost cause."

Taylor said he and his team used every resuscitation device he knows of, in order to get Allen stable enough to be transported by helicopter to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

"Before we flew him to Pittsburgh, we rapidly cooled his body to protect his brain,"

Taylor said. "These were all heroic measures."

Bonnie rushed home to get her things together.

"Right when I got to my front door, I saw the helicopter take off," she said. "They told me there was a less than 50 percent chance that he was going to make it. I didn't lose faith."

After a less-than-four-minute helicopter ride -- one in which Allen's heart again had to be shocked into a normal beat -- Allen arrived at Allegheny General Hospital. Awaiting his arrival was Dr. David Lasorda, who placed a stent in the blocked artery that caused the heart attack.

"In the best situation, there's a 50 percent chance the patient will live when someone's in Mr. Fennell's condition," said Lasorda, director of interventional cardiology for AGH. "Even if everything goes right and they survive, there's usually brain damage."

Dr. Stephen Bailey next saw Allen and determined that the stent wasn't enough: Allen needed to be placed on an ECMO machine. An ECMO machine is inserted through the groin and does the job of a heart while the patient's heart recovers from a massive trauma, according to Bailey.

"When we saw Mr. Fennell, he was in a death spiral," Bailey said. "The ECMO helped him pull out of that spiral."

While on the ECMO machine, Allen started to recover and -- much to the surprise of Lasorda and Bailey -- had no brain damage.

"The docs at AVH did dramatic work to keep him alive and get him here," Bailey said. "This was really the best-case scenario. It's not always the case, but this time it was perfect."

A pleasant recovery

After 10 days in a medically induced coma, Allen was on his way to recovery.

He spent 17 days in the hospital, but the father of two sons and two grandchildren was home in time to enjoy the holidays with family. It's something Taylor would never have predicted when he first saw Allen.

"I have never seen a resuscitation like this actually work," Taylor said. "He beat all odds.

"He's a young man and now has the potential to live a long life."

Allen is on a reduced sodium diet and uses crutches to get around the house because of damage the ECMO machine did to nerves in his leg. But he's in good health and being nursed back to 100 percent by Bonnie.

"Luckily, our employers were understanding," he said of her job at Eat'n Park and his at Allegheny Ludlum. "If she couldn't have gotten all this time off, I'd be in a nursing home for sure."

Lasorda, Bailey and Taylor agreed Allen's resuscitation will always hold a special place in their hearts.

"It gets you pumped up as a physician that you can pull a guy back up from near death and they can walk out of here," Lasorda said.

Allen said the whole episode has made him enjoy life more than ever and given him much to be thankful for.

"All you can do is say 'thank you,' " he said about everyone who helped to save his life.

"And that's not even close to enough."

Copyright 2012 - The Valley News-Dispatch, Tarentum, Pa.