two police officers, ER doctors, nurses,
and clergy. Basically, they said, ‘We
don’t know what’s gonna happen.’”
Someone informed her that John
had received CPR for 38 minutes be-
fore they established a pulse; the po-
lice estimate it at more (45). In any
event, it was a long time. “Generally,
after 30 minutes you start thinking,
When should we call this?” says Amy
McLaughlin, MD, the first physician to
examine John.He was transported to the intensive
care unit and sedated in hopes of giv-
ing his body time to recover. Two days
later—on his 36th birthday, in fact—
he started to wake up.
“He squeezed my hand,” Sarabeth
says. “I wasn’t sure if I would ever
have that again.”
Astonishingly, the only aftereffects
were some short-term memory loss
and an extremely sore chest from
the 3,500 compressions. “Not many
people make it out of that situation,”
Guiler says. “Seeing that he made a full
recovery is—I can’t even explain it.”
Adds Dr. McLaughlin: “Everything
that could go right for him did.”Guiler was about 50 feet away. He had
just tended to a minor accident and
was about to get back on the road. An-
other lucky stroke: Before joining the
police, he had been an EMT.
Guiler arrived at Panera in less than a
minute and began CPR. Within 30 sec-
onds, another police officer, Nikolina
Bajic, rushed in. “Coincidentally, I was
already dispatched to a second ac-
cident in the same parking lot,” Bajic
says. A few minutes later, four Char-
lotte firefighters arrived, opened John’s
airway, and fitted him with an oxygen
mask. They took turns performing CPR.
They also used a defibrillator to try to
shock his heart into restarting. It didn’t.
They shocked him again. And again.
And again. They gave him a shot of
epinephrine to return his heart to a
normal rhythm. Then another. Then
another. Nothing. No sign of life. More
than 20 minutes had gone by.
“Nobody wanted to give up on him,”
says Bajic.
Around 4:30 p.m., while John was
receiving CPR from a total of eight first
responders, his iPhone started ring-
ing. It was his wife. “I called a couple
times, but he didn’t answer,” Sarabeth
says. “I assumed he was in a meeting.”
A little over an hour later, she was
heading to her parents’ for dinner
with the couple’s three children when
Novant Health Presbyterian Medical
Center called. She was told John had
gone into cardiac arrest.
“It was terrifying,” she says. “When I
got there, I was taken into a room with
“AFTER 30 MINUTES
YOU START THINKING,
WHEN SHOULD
WE CALL THIS?”from the charlotte observer (july 16, 2017),
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