Bystanders Rally to Save Doctor Felled by Cardiac Arrest While Riding
“So when your heart stops beating you’re supposed to die. Thankfully I had a guardian angel (and EMT) riding just behind me. Prompt CPR and medical attention saved me. I’m going to celebrate June 8th as my second birthday because this truly is a second lease on life…Now I just need to find my guardian angel and thank him personally...I owe him a beer and my life, not necessarily in that order.”
That was the Facebook post 45-year-old Vikram Verma made on June 14, six days after his heart did indeed stop beating and left him unresponsive on the pavement, with six broken ribs and a fractured clavicle, amid the sprawling farmland and housing developments in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania.
Verma, a kidney specialist and internal medicine physician, had just done 20 miles “before the miles,” clocking some saddle time on a Saturday morning before circling back to his house to refill his bottles and do a short spin to the Valley Preferred Cycling Center.
He’d planned to meet his 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter at the velodrome to participate in a memorial ride for a young cyclist who had passed away from osteosarcoma earlier this year.
Verma never made it.
Less than a mile from his house on his way to the track, Verma collapsed on the roadside, stricken with what doctors grimly refer to as a “widowmaker,” an especially deadly kind of heart attack that comes on suddenly when the left anterior descending artery (LAD)— the largest of the three arteries feeding blood to the heart—becomes 100 percent blocked.
They often run in the family—Verma’s father had a heart attack at age 34—and they can be fatal within minutes.
Most heart attacks don’t trigger sudden cardiac arrest—an electrical problem when the heart malfunctions and stops beating—but widowmakers do. That’s what happened in Verma’s case: His heart stopped beating.
While Verma did have a widowmaker, his wife, Deepti, was not to become a widow that sunny Saturday morning. A lucky series of passersby were so ideally equipped to save Verma that, as he later told his local newspaper, The Morning Call, in their own report he finds it hard to believe they were not sent by divine intervention.
A key figure was Larry Detris. The retired firefighter and avid cyclist was on his way to his club’s Saturday morning ride when he glanced down a side road at an intersection and saw Verma lying on the ground, bystanders gathered around.
“It just didn’t look right,” Detris tells Bicycling. “I’ve seen crashes, but there were bystanders around him not really doing anything, and he wasn’t moving or trying to get up.”
Detris turned down the street and assessed the scene. The bystanders—drivers who happened to be behind Verma when he suddenly toppled over—had stopped and called 911 as well as Verma’s wife, using the emergency contact feature on Verma’s phone. But they were afraid to move him in case he had a neck injury.
“They told me not to touch him,” Detris recalls. But he could hear Verma’s “agonal breathing,” the gasping sound associated with cardiac arrest, and knew by experience that time was not on their side. “I told them unless we started care, any other injuries weren’t going to matter very much.”
Detris rolled Verma over and checked for a pulse. There was none. At the same time Wendy Robb, dean and professor at Cedar Crest College School of Nursing, had pulled up and jumped out of her car to lend a hand.
The two got to work in tandem: Detris began chest compressions, while Robb removed Verma’s helmet, opened his airway, and held his head steady in place.
Meanwhile another nurse, Kelsey Miller, was passing by en route to a local 5K run. She pulled over and joined the ad hoc care team, monitoring Verma’s femoral artery for a pulse, which was fleeting.
Then Anthony Levan, a local EMT responding to the 911 call, arrived on the scene with his automated external defibrillator (AED), and delivered shocks to help jumpstart Verma’s heart.
Moments later, Verma’s wife arrived. As a physician herself, she joined the effort to keep Verma alive. When the group resumed CPR, she began rescue breathing, an act that left a lasting impression on Detris.
“It was an amazing, moving moment,” he recalls. “I was thinking she’s either going to breathe life into him or she’s going to share his last breath.”
It was the former. Within minutes, the ambulance drove up. The medics strapped an automated chest compressor on Verma and whisked him to the hospital, where he would receive the Arctic Sun protocol (medically induced hypothermia to reduce the risk of brain damage following a heart attack), four stents, and a new lease on life.
Five weeks later, Verma was back on the bike with his doctor’s blessing, brimming with gratitude for what promises to be a full recovery.
“Without those angels stopping to keep my heart pumping, the outcome would have been very different,” he says.
Quick action and CPR by passersby likely saved Verma’s life that day. Read on to learn what you can do if you find yourself in a similar situation.
What To Do When Someone’s Heart Stops
According to the American Heart Association (AHA), 90 percent of people who have cardiac arrest outside of the hospital die.
CPR, especially if it’s administered quickly can double or triple someone’s odds of surviving cardiac arrest, the AHA reports. Statistics show about 45 percent of people who go into cardiac arrest survive when a bystander performs CPR. Unfortunately, fewer than 46 percent of those who have cardiac arrest outside of a medical facility receive CPR.
The reason that number is so low? People simply don’t know what to do. Or they’re afraid of doing something wrong.
The AHA and American Red Cross want to change that.
“If you do something, it’s better than nothing,” Jeffrey Pellegrino, Ph.D., MPH, professor of health sciences at Aultman College in Canton, Ohio, and member of the American Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council. “Good Samaritan laws give you permission to help. And you should help. It can make a big difference in someone’s life.”
Here are all the ways you can help.
Start With 911
If you’re out on a ride (or anywhere) and someone drops over from cardiac arrest—they’re unresponsive when you yell at them or tap them on the shoulder—call 911 immediately. The quicker they get professional medical care, the better their chances of survival. (Note: Any breathing or heart trouble is a medical emergency and merits a 911 call).
The dispatchers can also coach you through some of the key elements of CPR if you don’t know what to do. Just put your phone on speaker, place it next to the victim, and receive your instructions.
That’s what saved 57-year-old James Robbins of San Antonio, Texas, when he had cardiac arrest during the Tour De Boerne bike ride this past June. A small group of cyclists found him unresponsive and called 911. A dispatcher talked them through chest compressions for 10 minutes until help arrived, according to an NBC News 4 San Antonio report.
Get an AED
You can find these portable defibrillators in most public buildings, like libraries, airports, malls, and supermarkets. They analyze the heart rhythm and, if necessary, deliver an electric shock to help the heart re-establish an effective rhythm. They’re used in conjunction with CPR and help increase odds of survival.
You won’t likely find one if you’re riding in the country miles from nowhere, but if your pack is rolling through a town and there are enough people to perform CPR, it’s worth sending someone to grab one.
Learn CPR
Getting CPR and AED certified through the Red Cross gives you the opportunity to get hands-on practice with resuscitation mannequins and experience with portable defibrillators, so if you ever should need those skills, you’re all the more quick and confident to act.
But you can learn the ropes of basic CPR without official certification. You can watch videos and download printable fact sheets from cpr.heart.org.
While rescue breathing combined with chest compressions is ideal, the mouth-to-mouth aspect can act as a barrier for bystanders when it comes to CPR. That’s why it’s important to know that compression-only CPR is also effective.
A 2019 Swedish study of more than 34,000 people who had cardiac arrest found that those who received rescue breathing had slightly better outcomes, but any form of CPR, including just compressions, doubled the chances of survival over no CPR.
Download the Red Cross First Aid app
The American Red Cross has a first aid app that can literally be a lifesaver, Pellegrino says. “It’s free and it downloads to your phone, so it’s there whether you have service or not.”
It has a pop-up button for you to call 911 and will show you a map to the nearest facility. It also walks you through the steps you need to take in every type of emergency situation, including cardiac arrest. You can find it by searching “American Red Cross” in your app store or visiting redcross.org/apps.
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