Jim and Linda Fargus have been married 44 years. Their lives
were fairly ordinary most of that time. They have a son and daughter, two
grandchildren, worked long careers before retiring, took part-time jobs after
retirement. They traveled occasionally and kept physically active. Then came
the night Linda’s heart stopped.
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| Jim and Linda Fargus |
Jim and Linda met in college, a small university in
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, where they both landed in part because of cost and
geography. They got to know each other as they waited tables in the campus
dining hall. They moved to Overland Park in 1999 for Jim’s job. Both retired in
2006, Jim as a project manager with Sprint, Linda as a teacher. Shortly after
retirement, Jim took a job as a math instructional paraprofessional, Linda as
an adjunct reading instructor at Johnson County Community College. Nothing in
their ordinary lives prepared them for what was to come.
Shortly after midnight , the beginning of the Monday that
would mark their 41st wedding anniversary, Jim was awakened by a
noise.
“Linda has always been an active sleeper,” Jim said. “She
would sit up in bed, have conversations, and I was pretty attuned to all of
that.” So when Jim heard a noise, he did the usual, which was to pat her on the
arm and let her know everything was okay and she could go back to sleep. But
this night, she wasn’t sitting up in bed, and he got no response when he asked
her if she was all right.
Within moments, Jim realized she wasn’t breathing. Though he
had CPR training, it was sheer instinct that took over. Instinct coupled with
fear and adrenaline. He moved Linda to the floor, started doing chest compressions
and called 911. “I had the phone laying on the floor, it wasn’t a speaker
phone, and I was yelling into it,” Jim said. All he knew was that his wife had
no pulse and wasn’t breathing and he was desperately trying to save her. The
911 dispatcher told Jim to stop the compressions and give her a couple of
breaths. He did so and saw her chest rise, but she wasn’t breathing on her own.
He began compressions again, until the dispatcher told
him the ambulance was two minutes out, and he needed to go downstairs, open the
front door and turn on the porch light. He did those things, then returned to
Linda. Finally he heard the siren and knew help was near.
Soon there was a lot of commotion. Jim said there were three
or four paramedics, and a couple of police officers. One of the officers
escorted Jim to the hallway, and kept him company as the paramedics worked on
his wife. “I heard them shock her,” Jim said. “The defibrillator talks, and I
heard it three times.” Jim estimates they were in with his wife for 30 to 45
minutes, before they carried her out wrapped in a bed sheet for the ride to the
hospital. Jim had called his son, who lived in town, and the two of them headed
to the hospital as well.
“We sat for two hours, and didn’t know anything,” Jim said.
Finally the on-call cardiologist met with Jim and his son, and explained that
Linda didn’t have a heart attack. Instead, she had an episode of ventricular tachycardia,
where the heart beats too fast and the ventricles can’t pump enough blood to
the body. It can be severe and life-threatening. And because Linda had gone a
period of time without breathing, there was a very real possibility of brain
damage. Linda had been placed in a cooling suit that would lower her body
temperature so that her brain wouldn’t swell, and was put into a coma.
Twenty-four hours had elapsed since Linda’s heart had
stopped before Jim finally went home to rest. Though Linda went into cardiac
arrest again overnight, the medical team was able to keep her alive.
When something dramatic or life-threatening happens, we
oftentimes look for a sign that all will be well. For Jim, that moment came Wednesday
afternoon. Linda was still in a coma, and had a breathing tube down her throat,
so conversation wasn’t an option. But when Jim took hold of her hand, she knew
to squeeze it, a recollection that still causes him to swell with emotion as he
recounts it.
Linda remained in the hospital for eight days. Her brain
activity had continually been good, a positive indicator that she would once
again have a good quality of life. She has no memory of the week preceding the
night her heart stopped, and very little memory of the events during her
hospital stay. It’s almost as though this happened to someone else, yet she
knows it’s real because of the emotion she’s seen in her husband and adult
children. She finds it interesting that Jim proved to be so stalwart. “This is
the one,” she said of Jim, “who when the kids fell and needed stitches, he
couldn’t drive them to the hospital.”
Jim was able to step up in another way too, a way that
illustrated a strong faith. He saw God’s hand throughout this experience. “I’m
hard of hearing, and for me to hear something like that…” Jim said, referring
to the elusive sound that woke him when Linda’s heart stopped. He also trusted
that the outcome would be okay. “I always knew she could die,” he said, “but I
never thought she would.” Linda enjoyed hearing this from Jim, because, as she
noted, “He’s the half-empty kind of guy.”
The two of them have adopted the saying, “It’s all small
stuff,” meaning they have changed their perspective on what matters and what
doesn’t. “Every day, every bit of time we have together is precious,” Jim said.
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| Jim & Linda with grandchildren |
Linda has what she calls a lump under her chest as a
reminder of what happened. That lump is a pacemaker and defibrillator, tools to
help keep her heart beating at a normal rate. She is once again physically
active, is involved in the Holy Cross music ministry, and life continues much
as it used to. Like Jim, Linda too had a moment when she knew she would be
okay. That time came in November, a few months after she had returned home from
the hospital, when she got to hold her first grandchild. “I just thought I
might not get to see her, hold her,” Linda said.
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