this is a true story...
They say that after four minutes without oxygen being pumped to the brain, as a result of heart failure, a person dies. But as Kristen calmly explained, three months ago her heart stopped beating for a full fifteen minutes. And here she is, right in front of me, living and breathing, with no brain damage or excessive damage to her heart muscles.
"It really is a miracle, you know?" She speaks honestly and openly, as if recounting the plot of a horror flick, instead of telling me about the most frightening thing ever to happen in her twenty two years. Three months ago, while walking around her apartment, her heart simply stopped. Her husband of one year, Jeff, found her doubled up on the tile floor, unconscious and having a seizure. When the paramedics arrived, the police trailed behind, and forced him to leave their home so they could search for drugs. "I understand why they did a drug search. I mean, a young girl like me, in cardiac arrest? That's not normal."
At the hospital, the medical team revived a heart beat but were doubtful of her recovery. The nurse kept telling Jeff that she would never wake up from the coma, that her body had been through too much trauma to recoup. But he loved her passionately and refused to believe the nurse's warning. Fortunately, she pulled through. Now, as she places her hand over the two inch raised scar marking her pacemaker's insertion, she remembers the nurse's further assessment of her condition. "She said that when I woke up, I was worse off than if I had been on 50 hits of acid, because of the amount of medicines I had in my body."
Since the incident, Kristen learned a name for the type of heart attack she had experienced. Sudden Cardiac Death Syndrome. Despite its ominous connotations, she looks on the whole situation lightly and takes things one day at a time. "I called my grandma and said 'Isn't it funny that I died before you?'"