Lessons learned from a near death experience

Remember those opening scenes of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat?”

Now those old clips remind me a bit of Tom Pitzer’s Bloomsday experience back on May 6. Pitzer finished Bloomsday, Spokane’s annual 12K race, with a respectable time for a physically-fit 68-year-old who walked and jogged it in an hour and 42 minutes. But as he crossed the finish line, he went into cardiac arrest, collapsing on to the street.

He quickly points out that he chose the perfect place to collapse – about 40 feet from the medical tent. He was on a stretcher within 8 seconds and before a minute had elapsed, CPR was being performed.

“I was clinically dead for one and a half minutes,” he said. “They got my heart working again, but not working that great.”

Meanwhile, his wife, Elaine, was on the other side of the River and rushed to the tent where he was being treated, but was not allowed in. “That was really tough on her,” he said.

Pitzer was rushed to Sacred Heart Medical Center where doctors continued to work to stabilize him. Eventually after an angiogram and the placement of a stent (a tube that holds the artery open) he started to gain strength.

Pitzer feels fortunate to have survived a cardiac incident that came with virtually no warning signs. There are 250,000 such incidents in the US each year and 98 per cent of them are fatal, he said.

He has no memory of any of the trauma that Sunday. He had no sensation of entering into a light as some report with a near-death experience. Even a return visit to the race course weeks later didn’t spark any memories. He said he continually asked family and friends why he was in the hospital. When he returned home he felt fragile and weak.

What was this experience like for a man of faith? A man who has been a faithful church-goer and leader at his parish, St. Stephen’s, Spokane, and in the Diocese?

It was hard, he said, to realize he was not the “super-human” kind of guy he thought he was. A runner for 20 years, an avid skier, a man who watches his diet and exercises every day, he didn’t expect to suffer a cardiac incident.

There were several learnings from his experience, he said.

The first was that he had to fight a feeling of being fragile as he continued to recover. He has plenty of life left to live and is grateful for that. “I really do believe our Creator said ‘not now.’ Who am I to say I’ll change my whole life and become like a mouse?”

He also learned that he didn’t have much, if any, control over what happened to him. Despite his healthy lifestyle, this still happened to him. That, he says, is “scary.” It would be easy to be obsessed with the things he does have control over, like losing a little more weight, but he needs to come to grips with that.

He also has some increased interest in the purpose of his life and has some new goals.

Pitzer says he has noticed that he is more aware and appreciative of things around him – the beauty of nature, the people who come and go. And this already kind and gentle man describes an increased sense of tolerance and acceptance of others.

The Eucharist, always important in his life, has taken on a deeper significance. Worship is also a time, he says, when he can say, “Thanks for saving me.”

Pitzer retired from Kaiser Aluminum several years ago and taught at Whitworth College (now Whitworth University) in the School of Business for 10 years. A former marathon runner, he decided in the 1980s to shift his running to shorter races. He is a former senior warden at St. Stephen’s, chaired the diocesan Mission and Structure Committee and served on the cabinet for the recent endowment campaign, Renewing Our Mission.

He has had some new projects under way that grow from his Bloomsday experience. One was a television interview geared to making healthy people aware of the need for cardiac health. Another emerging venture is working with a rehabilitation hospital on preventative care for people involved in athletics.

And he’s already thinking about next year’s Bloomsday.

“I’m looking at the medical end,” he said. “I’m making a case for more defibrillators at different places on the course.”