Every Beat Of My Heart: One man's journey from near-death to complete re covery

By Jeff Waters

One ordinary evening, Jeff Waters suffered a cataclysmic cardiac arrest that killed him instantly. He was clinically dead for one hour, so how did he live to tell the tale? A miraculous story of survival and courage.
One ordinary weekday evening, Jeff Waters had just gone to bed in his Melbourne home when pain began in his left arm and chest. He mentioned it casually to his wife, a GP, but dismissed her evident alarm - after all, he ate healthily, he swam regularly, he wasn't overweight or diabetic, and he was only 43. What did he have to worry about? Seconds later 'a dark curtain fell' and he was dead. A huge cardiac arrest stopped his heart completely. His wife was already calling the ambulance as he fell to the ground and, until the ambulance arrived, she straddled his chest and administered CPR as their daughter watched from the doorway. the paramedics could not force Jeff Waters' heart to work for one hour. When they finally managed to revive him, they were convinced he would have brain damage. this is his story of the journey back from death, and the many trials both physical and psychological that followed.Every Beat of My Heart is more than a deeply personal account of a near-death experience. Jeff Waters is an experienced senior journalist with ABC News and he brings his journalistic training to bear on his investigation of his own terrifying post-traumatic stress, current medical science and the politics of heart disease as governments struggle to cope with an ageing population and prevention. this is ultimately a life-affirming memoir of how the power of love, self belief and application of your intelligence can help you survive, recover and learn from a terrifying ordeal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780730497554

Jeff Waters

Jeff Waters is a senior journalist on ABC TV's 7 o'clock news. He has worked as a multi-platform journalist whose reports on international politics, human rights and social justice have been broadcast in 20 countries. His material regularly broadcast on 7.30, Lateline, Landline, Inside Business and Newsline with Jim Middleton, and radio current affairs shows AM, PM, The World Today and Correspondents’ Report. As well as The Canberra Times, Jeff has written for Australian Associated Press, Singapore’s Straits Times, the ABC’s The Drum website, and many other publications. In 2008, he published his first book, Gone for a Song.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

‘Mummy, why are you counting?’ Zoe had woken, and was swinging into the master bedroom doorway. She was wearing her summer pyjamas. Her hair was a bleary mess.

‘One, two, three.’ Fiona, breathless, was pumping at my chest at a little faster than one push a second.

‘Why are you counting?’

The seven-year-old was standing near the foot of the bed. Fiona’s memory of the moment is not complete, but she recalls saying something like: ‘Daddy’s very unwell and I’m treating him.’ Zoe stood silently, watching her mother giving me mouth-to-mouth: two sharp breaths. Then more pumping. ‘Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight …’ It was hard work, but Fiona kept pushing at her lifeless husband’s chest and listening out through the hot, dry night for a siren.

We don’t yet know what Zoe did for the next several minutes, and we have no intention of asking her. Maybe she’ll tell us one day. Hopefully she won’t remember.

I have no recollection of being there. Neither did I experience anything particularly profound. I saw no tunnels or lights. I did not hover, disembodied, over the scene. There were no long-gone relatives to embrace. Just nothing. I’ve since studied the subject at some length and can’t really find an apt definition. It seems that, as science advances, it becomes more and more complicated a task to determine where life ends, and death begins. The general consensus seems to be that death arrives when your heart stops beating in its regular fashion and your blood stops flowing. By that definition, I was most certainly dead and, though I was revived many times over the next few hours, most of those resurrections were followed by a return to the state of clinical death.

Whatever the definition, my heart was quivering uncontrollably and completely ineffectively. I had suffered a fatal loss of blood pressure due to the failure of my heart. That same ruddy organ that had seen me through an active and sunny childhood, and – in spite of being shockingly damaged, at times, in failed romance – had carried me across tundra and deserts and oceans in adult life, had stopped working. My brain, though crippled, was still partially functioning, and would do so for a few more minutes. Maybe I’d get a bit longer with good cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). As I have been subsequently informed, it was all the fault of a piece of crusted sludge, most likely less than a millimetre deep. It had deposited itself within my left anterior descending artery – one of the largest blood expressways in the heart. The sludge had slowly built up over time. Its surface, protruding inside the artery, was crusted over, but within, it was all grim and gelatinous. The bugger cracked – the crust, for whatever reason, split. The goo inside spewed forth to block the tiny pipe. And the blockage didn’t budge. So my heart muscle went into spasm.

Inside that muscle, which is about the size of a fist, are extremely delicate nerve relays that transmit electrical impulses to regulate your heartbeat. Those impulses became disrupted by the blockage, and they caused strange quivers and flutters and irregular beats called arrhythmias. The quivers and flutters are called ventricular fibrillation (VF). VF may have been bad enough, but, more importantly, the oxygen within the blood that my heart had until then been pumping was sitting idle, unused and unrefreshed, as I had also stopped breathing. My brain – according to the literature at least – had between four and six minutes without oxygen before it too would shut down completely. It was extremely likely to be progressively damaged during that time. Few attempts at resuscitation succeed after ten minutes.

According to the American Heart Association, more than 95 per cent of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) victims die before reaching hospital. But my wife, being a GP, was administering perfect CPR. Thirty-five pumps with both hands to the bottom part of the sternum, followed by two short breaths. (Please beware that guidelines like this change from time to time, so it is advisable to refresh your understanding of the latest science regularly.) Good CPR is essential to ensure not only the survival of a victim of such drastic instances, but also to increase the chances of a good recovery if the patient does survive. The American Heart Association says a victim’s chances of survival are reduced by 7 to 10 per cent with every minute that passes without CPR or defibrillation – where a patient is shocked with electric pads.

It had been an otherwise uneventful evening. Early February, and hot; it felt calm, a sensation I’d not experienced for months. I’d spent much of the previous spring supervising major house renovations. To save money, we spent most of the time still living at home – as separate as possible to the building work. Our four-year-old son, Jonathan, moved in with his big sister, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of her room. His room now held storage boxes and a makeshift kitchen. We lost walls, had new flooring put in and saw a fine kitchen grow. I’d done all of the painting myself, coat after coat. The work ended just before Christmas when, the painting not quite finished, we headed off in the car for a holiday on Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, at the home of Fi’s sister Jo, her husband, Tom, and their two boys Matthew and Alexander. We kayaked and had picnics and swam every afternoon in the pool. I attempted, with an unfortunate measure of overconfidence, to do a full flip on a knee board over the wake of Tom’s speedboat. I spent a day with mild concussion.

On Christmas Eve, Santa Claus did his rounds on the lake aboard a big red ferry called The Wangi Queen. The boat stopped at a park near Jo and Tom’s house so that Santa could be mobbed by local kids grasping for lollies. For the festive meal I boned a turkey, stuffed it, sewed it up, and boiled its baked bones for gravy. It was a memorable Christmas.

Afterwards, we left the lake and the relatives to stay – just the four of us – in a flat overlooking the beach at The Entrance on New South Wales’ Central Coast. It was an idyllic summer holiday of the type I’d dreamed about for most of my adult life – particularly during my decade in London. I was back in a zone similar to the endless summer beach holidays of my childhood, with pies and chocolate milkshakes and sand and rolling surf. The only difference was that I was now acting in the role of Dad, with my gorgeous blonde wife, an energetic daughter with a bright pink boogie board, and a sports-mad son with a brand-new beach cricket set. I joined the ranks of fathers, with wide-brimmed straw hats, tight black UV rashies and coloured board shorts. But due to a long-term foot condition, I had to keep off my feet as much as possible, so I found myself sitting at the water line rather than standing with legs apart and arms crossed like all the other fathers. We often ate out for lunch, and I cooked at night. I’d start off the evening with a beer or a glass of wine on the balcony, strumming my guitar for the benefit of anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot, and would advance to several glasses of red as I cooked dinner and sat back to watch TV with my wife. Life was grand.

So the attack that February night came as a dreadful surprise. Fi had been watching the TV as I finished off in the kitchen. I don’t remember much about it any more, and I don’t remember retiring. Until I interviewed Fiona for this book I hadn’t realised that I had actually gone to bed before it had happened.

The late evening was hot and sultry. The new ceiling fan in the bedroom circulated in the darkness above. Fiona soon joined me in bed, and as she drifted off to sleep, was roused. I had leapt to my feet and rushed to the bathroom. I threw up in the toilet. I didn’t know it, but that was when the crusty plaque in my artery had burst. I vaguely remember being sick, and wondering if I’d actually drunk too much red wine. Surely not, but why else was this happening?

I sat on the bed and told her that, not only had I thrown up, but I also had pain in a band across my chest and down my left arm. Fi tells me I looked quite perplexed as I explained my condition. Meanwhile, my heart was still beating, but it was doing so erratically, and was being irreparably damaged as it misfired. Much of it was being denied oxygen. I was also feeling short of breath, and sweaty and clammy, and conveyed this information to Fiona.

Fi says she instantly diagnosed a heart attack. ‘My immediate response was: Well, it can’t be happening, but at the same time it sounds like a heart attack.’

It was then that I did what has become the most stupid thing of my life. I objected to Fiona’s concern, and dismissed her suggestion to call an ambulance. I remember this bit quite clearly. I said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, what will we do with the children? I’m not calling an ambulance for a panic attack!’

Fiona responded: ‘You don’t have panic attacks.’

I acknowledged the parry and shut up. I have, of course, dwelled on this moment ever since. I knew the symptoms of heart attack – well, at least the part where you get pain across your chest and down your left arm – but not for one moment on that evening was I going to entertain the possibility that I was having one. It didn’t even enter my mind. I completely dismissed the warning signs. Then I apparently said (and I can’t remember this): ‘Oh it’s OK, it’s all gone now.’

Fiona, not quite reassured, turned the light off and lay down beside me. In an instant, I sat up again, complaining of pain across the chest. Fiona went to call the ambulance. She rushed to the phone in the sitting room, and then back into the bedroom, dialling 000. I don’t remember her holding the phone, but I do remember her talking as I blacked out, and, still not thinking clearly, wished her goodbye from a position of blissful, jocular ignorance, as my heart went into full-blown VF.

‘Here I go!’ I said.

Fiona thought I knew, as she did, that I was dying. I didn’t. I thought I was fainting, so made light of the unusual sensation: ‘Bye, darling,’ I said. If I didn’t actually smile as I went down, I certainly felt like I could have been. There was no time to analyse the situation any further. I clearly had no grasp of the seriousness of the situation. Seated in my bed, a dark curtain came down as my brain tried to cope with its depleted oxygen supply. It descended in my field of vision as a blackness with smudged edges, the background slightly blurring in a band as it dropped. It was by no means threatening, but it was fast and complete. I slumped into the bed and, according to Fiona, I went grey and looked, almost immediately, like a corpse. I had died.

To the operator, Fi said something like: ‘Oh my God, he’s collapsed.’ The operator responded. An ambulance was on the way. Then the operator started to explain the first stages of CPR, not knowing that Fi already had experience with trying to raise the dead. ‘I’m starting CPR,’ Fiona told her, and threw the phone across the room. It was later to be found, discarded, in the corner.

A couple of kilometres away, paramedic Sarah Obbeek and a colleague received a computer call from the emergency operator. ‘I remember getting the job – initially it came down as just a chest pain, and then we got updated: CPR was in progress and there was a GP on the scene.’ I had tracked Sarah down – with the help of her former employer, Ambulance Victoria – to her new home in Auckland.

‘We get all of that information through our computer,’ she said. ‘When it came down as chest pain, initially it was just us coming, but then they sent MICA10 from [an even closer station].’ MICA stands for Mobile Intensive Care Ambulance. It was late at night and neither ambulance station was otherwise engaged. I would be lucky enough to receive some of the best paramedic care available in Australia from two teams. At the same time, a Fire Brigade station not far from my house also got a call. The race was on to our otherwise quiet little street.

Fi shook me. She slapped me around the face. She shouted at me. There was no response. She says she didn’t bother checking for a pulse. She already knew there wouldn’t be one to find. So she breathed two sharp breaths into me. I began to regurgitate, but the contents in my stomach didn’t quite make it to the surface. So she tipped me on my side to try to let it flow free, but it would not come. She began the chest compressions. Fiona says she felt confronted by the situation, but was confident in her knowledge of what to do. After all, she’d been taught CPR as part of her medical training, and had applied it to very ill patients in hospitals. Now she would apply it to her own dead husband.

Fiona counted out loud while compressing my chest so as to focus her mind. ‘I’ve done CPR before and I guess you just go into the rhythm. And being able to focus on what I was doing was helping me – not letting my brain go, Oh my God, he’s dead. So I was just thinking: OK, I’ve got to do this. The ambulance will come, and then he’ll need shocks, and then he’ll come back. I knew that the important thing was to get oxygen into your brain – oxygen around your system so that your brain remained oxygenated.’ It would be another six minutes until the ambulance arrived. Six very long minutes. Zoe watched from the end of the bed, everything quiet but for the counting.

Fiona says her arms began to shake as she pumped. The shock was starting to take effect. Then, finally, she heard a distant siren. ‘I knew that they’d come quickly and I knew that I was very lucky … I knew that I could have been waiting for a long time.’

When we had returned home to our leafy Melbourne suburb after the Christmas break, the weather was dry and hot and often windy, and we spent weekends seeing friends and swimming at the bay. We try to take our insufferably overenthusiastic dog, Jacko, to an off-leash beach about once a week so he can take to the water. We think he’s a Jack Russell–border collie cross. He’s a Londoner, an East Ender, but he’s taken to Aussie beaches like a local. Fiona, using a ball-thrower, tosses balls out into the bay for him as I snorkel around the reefs and weed beds. That year, Zoe’s swimming was finally strong enough for her to join me snorkelling around the sandy-bottomed shallows along the edge of the weeds, where we circled schools of garfish and saw flatheads and starfish and scores of other colourful creatures.

I had returned to my desk in the ABC’s Melbourne newsroom and, in late January, my parents drove down from Brisbane, where I grew up and went to university. Mum and Dad – Irene and Les – stayed with us for a week, and left on a Sunday. With parents departed and Christmas finally over, we were all refreshed and rejuvenated. We had a glorious new living room and kitchen with bifold doors and windows. So we decided to show off the renovations by having two large groups of friends over for Sunday lunches over successive weekends. I had a week to prepare a summer barbie feast for some of our close Melbourne friends. A total of 19 people. It would be the first party in our new house. We’d lounge outside as the children went mad in the garden. The adults would booze and graze on good food. We hadn’t had a chance to entertain these friends en masse for about a year.

The weekend after that, we had plans to entertain some of my close work friends, including my boss, Michele, and her husband, Nick, who we’d known for years but had never invited around. To cater for both functions, and exploit a swish, newly acquired barbecue, I planned to spend weeknights preparing dishes that could either sit in the fridge for a while or be frozen. Others would be whipped up on Friday evening or on the day. With ingredients at hand, I’d spent Monday and Tuesday nights the week of my cardiac arrest preparing one of my favourite things – rillettes du porc. I’ve always had a penchant for the worst doses of saturated fat that traditional provincial French food has to offer. So I’d chopped a large amount of fatty pork belly into chunks, seasoned it heavily with salt and pepper, and baked it slowly for hours in an oven. I’d covered the meaty morsels with stock and allowed the liquid to become a sticky reduction. It was mashed with a fork then poured into pots and left to set in the fridge, a nice layer of salty pork fat sealing the top. I would make a tri-colour vegetable terrine, stir-fried vegetarian Japanese soba noodles, marinated chicken and lamb and a selection of couscous and salads. It was industrial-level catering, undertaken every night after I’d already cooked a dinner for the family on return from work, and it would continue until the weekend.

Although I was generally not drinking at all on Tuesdays and Thursdays – when I would also exercise – I was making up for it on other evenings. Perhaps it was a leftover habit acquired during all that recent summer celebration, but I was often drinking in excess of half a bottle of red a night. It had been no different on the night of the arrest. The family dinner conversation that evening, or at least the chat between Fiona and myself, had turned to a rare, heated altercation I’d had that day with one of my colleagues. I told Fiona the disagreement had taken place, but that I had been pleased with the way I had handled the situation. Finally, I told Fiona that, after a long period of stress as a result of what I perceived as a career struggle, I had reached a point where I was happy with my professional situation. Indeed, as I’d left work that day, I’d told my colleague Kate that I’d never felt better after years of being unwell with chronic pain in my feet. It was an accidental eulogy.

Fiona says, as she pumped my chest that night, hoping to save my life, she recalled that dinner conversation and the sad irony of my comments. Here, immediately after voicing my contentment, my happiness with myself and my lot, I was clinically dead.

At that point, our dog appeared to display some understanding of the proceedings. I’m very proud of my canine companion’s intelligence, but I am embarrassed daily by his need to loudly announce the arrival at our front gates, or past our fence, of any person. He barks and jumps up and scares visitors, though to be fair, he rapidly settles down and becomes reasonable. Jacko also uses all of his vigour and good voice to chase off any bird within about 500 metres. But this night, with me collapsed and Fiona at work on top of me, he acted most strangely. He was silent as the paramedics entered the front garden and the house. He moved out of the way. Zoe let the ambulance men and women – and their firefighter colleagues – through the front door and into the master bedroom. Fiona turned to them in desperation and said something like, ‘Am I doing this OK?’ and they replied in the affirmative.

‘When we got there, your wife Fiona was doing really good CPR,’ Sarah the paramedic told me. ‘You were in VF at the time and we basically picked you up off the bed, put you on the floor and went straight into it.’ They transferred me into the fairly small space in between our bed and the wardrobe, moving the bed as far sideways as it would go. It would have been very cramped, and very hot.

‘From what your wife said it had happened really really quickly,’ Sarah said. ‘You’d developed really bad chest pain and then basically arrested in front of her and I think her CPR was a huge factor in the fact you survived.’

After they’d moved me onto the floor the team used a suction tube to remove the vomit lodged deep in my oesophagus. A huge amount of red wine flowed out with what was left of my dinner. It caused a big red stain on the new cream carpet.

Across the road, our neighbours Suzie and Dave were slowly roused from their sleep. Suzie jumped out of bed and went to the front door. She saw our light on and two fire trucks and an ambulance parked outside. Suzie knew there was a doctor in the house – that is, Fiona. ‘To call an ambulance – it must have been serious,’ Suzie said. She began to get worried, and her heartbeat faster. ‘I stayed on the verandah for a while and listened and waited and nothing was happening. I initially thought it was the kids and that’s what made me really anxious, but then for some reason I had a feeling it might have been you.’ She moved toward our house and other figures emerged from the darkness. One was Georgina, another neighbour, whom she didn’t know particularly well, sporting her pyjamas.

‘No socks, no shoes, no nothing, down the street,’ Georgina said. ‘Suzie was standing out in the street and there was an ambulance and a fire truck and I said: Well, it doesn’t look good. And she said, No. And the next thing we were standing out the front.’

Suzie and Georgina stood watching from outside for ‘what seemed like ages’. Nobody wanted to knock on our door. ‘But the longer that there was nothing happening and no ambulance men coming out the more worried I got,’ Suzie said, ‘because, from past experiences with my family and my neighbours, it means that someone’s not stable. Or possibly someone has died.’

The paramedic team shocked me once with a defibrillator before the MICA team arrived, and when they did, Sarah Obbeek worked at supporting her MICA colleagues. Firefighters also took turns applying CPR to my chest. I’ve subsequently discovered that it is common for firefighters who are not otherwise engaged to respond to cardiac arrest calls – in Melbourne at least. As every minute is so entirely crucial, the firefighters often arrive before the paramedics, and are fully trained in CPR. So these big burly fellows took turns at pumping at my poor chest while the paramedics attended to my medication and the defibrillator.

‘You were in VF pretty much all of the time,’ Sarah Obbeek said, adding that I was given about a dozen shocks with the defibrillator within the next several minutes, ‘which is quite a lot’. They gave me a shot of adrenaline, which is part of the resuscitation protocol. Sometimes, in these situations, it can help to kick-start the ticker.

‘There were honestly times when I really didn’t think that we were going to be successful,’ Sarah said. ‘Fifty minutes is a really, really long time for a cardiac arrest and I think your age [43] and good CPR before we arrived really did make a difference. Everything that we could do went really well. It flowed really well.’

I asked Sarah why it was that she had remembered my case so well. After all, I was talking to her about nine months after the event. ‘I don’t know to be honest,’ she said. ‘I think that, because of your age – I think that’s a huge factor. Also you can relate it to people in your life, and for me that’s something that happens in the job. I think about people that I’m close to and if this was my family member and how that must be for everyone else.’

At some stage while all this movement and noise was going on just a few metres from his open bedroom door, my son Jonathan roused. He walked toward the bedroom to join his sister.

‘I remember seeing your children standing at the bedroom door watching us,’ Sarah said.

‘Both of them?’ I asked.

‘Yeah and I found that really sad,’ Sarah said, ‘that they had to experience that. I remember them standing at the door only very briefly, when the firemen came, because there was a few of them and there wasn’t any room – it was quite small with all of us in there. And it’s hard because you can’t talk to people at the time because you are