TOM RIDGE IS LUCKY TO BE ALIVE: “I’M TOLD I FLATLINED THREE TIMES”
Tom Ridge, the former homeland security secretary and Pennsylvania governor, has been dealing firsthand with first responders for decades, but never quite like on the morning of Nov. 16.
Ridge was at a hotel in Austin, Texas, where he was attending a meeting of the Republican Governors Association. When he woke up, he wasn’t feeling well. But it was more than just not feeling well. “I also felt different,” he said. He didn’t know it then, but he was in danger of dying.
He reached for his cellphone and did a search on heart attacks. At age 72, he had no known heart issues, kept himself fit and had worked out a few days earlier without incident. He questioned whether there was anything seriously wrong, and after skimming through a narrative about heart problems, he lay back down on the bed.
But after his symptoms continued, he picked up his phone a second time and did another search. Up came a checklist of heart attack symptoms. “I said, ‘Check. Check. Check. Ridge, you could be having a heart attack,” he said. At that point he struggled to get out of bed and over to the hotel phone.
“By the time I got to the phone, I knew I was in big trouble,” he said. He was, as he put it, like a battery that was draining energy at an alarming rate. Ridge dialed the operator, gave his room number and said he needed help. “I woke up six days later,” he said.
An emergency team arrived at his room minutes after his call. For more than an hour, they worked on him. “I’m told I flatlined three times,” he said. Once in his room, a second time in the elevator and the third time in the lobby of the hotel.
He later learned that the emergency technicians took turns pounding on his chest, rotating one after another because of the physical effort required. In the process, they cracked his sternum and broke several ribs.
He says it was a small price to keep him alive. Once he got to the hospital, he was put on life support.
Ridge believes he was fortunate to be where he was at that moment of his heart attack. He was in a hotel filled with governors from around the country and therefore a hotel also filled with security people and emergency medical personnel.
They were able to respond almost instantly to his call for help.