The day on which my child's heart stood still

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I gently put her silent, pale 12-pound body on the trunk of a red Mazda to get a better look. “Ryan, is she okay?” My wife Kelly had just asked me. We were a block from Wrigley Field after a rare cubs won in Chicago on a sunny spring day. “Go Cubs Go” still rang in my ears.

Our 3 -month -old Emma no longer reacted, her mouth was agreed and after I had removed her swollen snowsuit, I couldn't find a pulse. As a doctor with regularly planned training in life -supporting algorithms, I was briefly paralyzed, unusually unsafe. “Start CPR!” Celly called out when our eyes met in a panicked look.

Right, I thought to myself. I dabbed the souvenir reserves and put my hands around Emma's breast cage and my thumb on her sternum. I pressed down and let the chest pull back. I did it again and again when I counted at 30. It was time to give her two breaths. Her chest got up effortlessly when I wondered if my exhaled air had enough oxygen to get it. I repeated this cycle when my own heart raced. Someone on the phone led me through CPR, although I did not deal with his instruction. There was only one focus and everything else in the world was too white.

“Do you need help?” A man in a black hat and an unkempt face hair asked when he approached with confidence. Of course I needed help, I thought. I had only given CPR stiff plastic crops. “Are you trained?” I asked him. He nodded when he stepped down to make breast compressions and I gave Emma breath.

If there was a siren in the distance, I didn't hear it. In a second that felt like seconds, there was an ambulance on the street, only on the left. Two men came out and said calmly: “We got it” when they cut off their clothes and put a plastic board under their still uniform body. One continued that HLW was moved to the ambulance. I followed them inside. They quickly put the electrodes on their chest, checked on a pulse and looked at the monitor. “Peas,” they said, and they all nodded in unison. My heart sank when I realized that there would be no way to shock her heart back into a rhythm.

What happened next was a cycle of several CPR in an endless loop that was only interrupted by the sound of a drill in Emma's tiny left shin and then her right shin to administer Epinephrin to increase the blood flow to the brain and heart. The compressions pumped their blood when her heart could not, and a larynx mask that pressed oxygen into her lungs and carbon dioxide. I don't remember the ambulance, which was more than a block, but outside the vehicle, the Chicago police stopped traffic to stand when they blocked every intersection between Emma and the next hospital. When the bikes came to a standstill, a doctor looked up and said he felt a pulse. “16 minutes,” said another. It was so long ago that Emma's heart had recently beaten alone.