“It all morphed into an ever-changing reality, one hour at a time. And I saw my son, who was 14 when all this began, grow up right before my eyes.”
Coming Back from the Brink of Death
When John Quinn stumbled across the finish line at the 2015 Broad Street Run, he wasn’t sure if he was merely exhausted from the run or experiencing a medical emergency. Despite training adequately for the run, he felt like the last two miles of the 10-mile race had happened in slow motion. Like he was “fighting the air” with every stride.
John collected himself and met up with his family in a nearby tent, where he had a drink and watched the runners behind him trickle in. Gradually, he started to feel better. But to this day, he wonders if the feelings he had during the Broad Street Run were the earliest warning signs of a heart problem.
The First Sign of Trouble
A few years prior, John had returned to running after a long hiatus. He enjoyed running 5Ks near his South Jersey home. While his times were respectable, he couldn’t help but notice that he was getting slower with each race. He wrote some of it off to aging — John turned 61 in 2015 — but he suspected it was more than that.
On a Saturday morning in December 2015, he woke up feeling “really crummy.” The feeling only worsened the next morning. A sports editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time, he never missed an Eagles gameday. But that day, he called out of work.
“There was no one symptom I could point to,” he says. “I just felt really terrible.”
The next morning, John took his teenage son, Jack, to the bus stop as he always did. As soon as Jack boarded the bus, John headed home and asked his wife, Amy, to take him to the doctor for the second time in a week. While Amy filled out forms at the reception desk, John suddenly turned pale and grabbed his chest. It was a heart attack.
From Bad to Worse
John was attended by paramedics at the doctor’s office, then rushed by ambulance to a nearby medical center. He went into cardiac arrest twice along the way, and paramedics revived him with a defibrillator.
At the hospital, doctors placed a stent in John’s right coronary artery and a pump in his aorta. He was stable and resting when, early the next morning, he went into cardiac distress. His lungs filled with fluid from his failing heart. He was revived again.
His doctors determined that the heart attack had caused a ventricular septal rupture: a rare and dangerous tear in the wall separating the heart’s lower chambers. He was transferred to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center for surgery to have it repaired. But before that surgery, he spent a week on life support.
“I am told I did move my eyes in response to questions,” John later wrote in an essay for the Inquirer in which he recounted the experience. “My sister said at one point I had 27 tubes or needles in me. Had to be strapped down to keep from jarring the myriad conjunctions. Had to have an ICU nurse 24/7. Had the ECMO machine pump the blood to allow the heart to recover before surgery.”
For the week before his surgery and the two weeks after it, John says he was unconscious, more or less. Everything he knows today about that period he’s been told by his family, the numerous friends who visited him, and the doctors and nurses who cared for him. For his wife and son, John says it was a deeply traumatizing time.
John credits his nurses and his cardiac surgeon Matthew L. Williams, MD, with not only saving his life but also for being supportive to his wife and son. “They gave my wife and family strength,” John says.
Every minute of every day seemed just right in my eventual path to recovery,” John wrote. “Learning to walk again and continuing to trust in the development of the dormant muscles. There would be speech therapy, swallow therapy, occupational and physical therapy, and smiles from nurses and cleaning people, transporters, and food-delivery personnel. It was like, I got the live wires, and it was all good.”
“It all morphed into an ever-changing reality, one hour at a time. And I saw my son, who was 14 when all this began, grow up right before my eyes.”
John returned home on February 12, 2016, after 53 days in the hospital.
The Road to Recovery
In late April, John returned to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where cardiac electrophysiologist Joshua Liez, MD, performed a procedure to implant a pacemaker defibrillator.
After the procedure, John was gradually feeling better until one night, he became nauseous. “It didn’t dawn on me until then that my recovery could be anything but straightforward,” he said.
Following the pacemaker implantation, Dr. Liez told John he was going to monitor him for a few days. If John’s condition did not improve, he would most likely need a heart transplant.
Fortunately, John’s condition did improve. And he’s been restoring his life over the nearly five years since. He exercises at a local gym five days a week, and he sometimes does multiple classes in a single day. He’s also running again. His 5K times are markedly slower than they were before, but he’s grateful to be running at all.
After his defibrillator was implanted, John watched the Broad Street Run from his hospital bed one year after his previous run in May 2015. His colleagues were running in T-shirts printed with his name. As he watched them on his screen, John wondered if watching from the sidelines would be the only way he’d ever experience running. But over the coming months and years, he would come to realize that he’d finally turned a corner.