They performed CPR and restarted his heart. High-tech interventions continued at the hospital. Dorreen had been a nurse for 14 years when she got the call that her brother was in a hospital. They told her that by the time he was resuscitated, he had lain eight minutes without breathing. In the ICU, his body was being kept alive by the steady drip of IV medications and the rhythmic puffing of a breathing machine.
Brain damage begins in as few as four or five minutes without oxygen.
Getting to her brother's side from Columbia required a 10-hour drive through the night and swirling snow. Dorreen met a sea of weary family faces at the hospital in Michigan. As nurses' families often do, they were waiting for her to take care of things. A neurologist estimated her brother's chances of making it out of the hospital alive at half of one percent. Half of one perfect is just a doctor's thin thread of humility saying the lifeline has already snapped.