If you happen to suffer a heart attack while driving your car, don’t crash into just any building. Make sure you crash into a cardiologist’s office. That could be the difference between returning to your loved ones and never seeing your pets again.
Trust me, you are far more likely to survive your heart attack if you do what Jeff Geraci, a 64-year-old financial planner in Virginia Beach, Virginia, recently did.
His health emergency occurred after a routine trip to a fitness club, where Geraci had lifted weights, used a rowing machine, and walked on a treadmill. When he got to his car, he didn’t feel good and sat for a little while before deciding to drive home. During the drive, he suffered a heart attack and veered off the road, crossing multiple lanes of traffic. Fortunately, he didn’t hit any other cars. Instead, he crashed into a sign near the office of Dr. Deepak Talreja, the chief of cardiology for Sentara Health, a regional healthcare network. Talreja heard the crash and rushed out to help Geraci while calling 911.
Imagine Geraci’s good luck. Of all the places to crash, he crashed near the chief of cardiology. With my luck, if I suffered a heart attack, I’d crash near a funeral home. The funeral director would run out to offer his services.
Talreja couldn’t assess Geraci’s condition immediately because the airbags had deployed. When he finally did, he discovered that Geraci was virtually dead.
“You weren’t breathing, and you didn’t have a pulse — SCD, sudden cardiac death,” Talreja said, speaking to Geraci during a news feature on a local TV station, WTKR. “And what that means is the heart just isn’t doing the job, and so it’s a form of death. But fortunately, we got things restarted very quickly, and so God was watching out...”
Geraci certainly believes that God ensured that his heart attack wasn’t fatal. “It’s such a testimony of God’s greatness, of all the things that had to happen to keep me alive,” he told WTKR. “It’s a miracle. God was there, and thank God Dr. Talreja was there.”
Talreja isn’t always at his medical practice, of course. Sometimes he’s at two local hospitals, and other times, he’s at home. It would have taken a longer drive to crash into his home. By then, it might have been too late, as Talreja noted: “So if he’d gone eight minutes or so without CPR and without blood flow, then we can probably resuscitate the heart for another 10 minutes or so, but the brain doesn’t recover, and so [he] wouldn’t be with us today.”
Geraci has a family history of heart attacks. That’s why he made it a point to exercise regularly. “My mother died of a heart attack... one sister has heart issues,” he said. “I’ve been an athlete since I was 14 years old. I work out all the time. I ran marathons, [I thought] it’s not going to happen to me.”
All of us think it’s not going to happen to us, but it’s always wise to take precautions, such as going regularly to a fitness club that’s within crashing distance of the chief of cardiology.
Geraci couldn’t prevent the heart attack, but he did somehow manage to dodge death. “I got an opportunity to come back, so there’s got to be a reason,” he said. “And every morning, I pray and think about, if I’m here, I need to be doing more than I was doing... Try to be a better person every day. Try to make everybody smile every day.”
Getting everybody to smile is a great goal, but what he really needs to do is persuade Talreja to put a large sign outside his office: “Having a heart attack? Please crash here.”
