Stayin' Alive

I've been surrounded by survivors lately. Today I had a photo shoot with some survivor volunteers who are our "posterpeople" for the campaign. Yesterday, I talked on the phone with a man who was saved a week ago.

This guy was working out at a local YMCA and had a sudden cardiac arrest, where the electrical aspect of the heart shorts out and the heart stops. So he's lying on the floor, not breathing, no heart beat and a doctor and a nurse who were working out and some Y staff grab the Automated External Defibrillator and shock him back to life. The AED was placed there three years ago with the help of our organization.

It was weird to talk to someone who basically died for several minutes and woke up in a hospital. You could tell how grateful he was to be alive. It was like that part in Fight Club where Tyler Durden threatens the liquor store clerk and makes him go back to school. "Tomorrow he will experience things in a whole new way. The cereal he eats will be the best in the world because he is there to eat it. "

That's what it's like to hear survivors talk. To hear the buoyancy in their voices and the disdain they have for those who had similar experiences but don't change their lives. It's funny to listen to people talk in percentages, like "The doctor gave me a 5 percent chance of making it through the night." The lingo changes and it becomes funny to listen to them rate their procedures against others. "He ONLY had a stent. I had a stent AND a bypass."

All in all, it's pretty humbling and although it doesn't change the inner mechanisms of the organization, at least it relieves the feeling of bullshit....at least for the afternoon.