This man was clinically dead — but 2 life-saving machines kept his blood pumping until his heart could recover

Chris Dawkins, a 55-year-old Vancouver physician, was clinically dead. After a routine 20-minute session on his rowing machine in early February, Dawkins went into cardiac arrest.

But with the help of his wife, a 911 call-taker, two paramedics, a 15-person medical team at St. Paul's Hospital and two life-saving machines that keep blood flowing to the patient's brain, Dawkins is now healthy, walking around and back at work.

On Monday, for the first time, he met the paramedics who answered the call in February.

"I gave them hugs and said, 'Thank you for saving my life' — because they did," said Dawkins.

Two months after the emergency, Dawkins has a bruise and some broken ribs to show for his brush with death, but he has otherwise healed up remarkably well. He's in awe of the number of things that perfectly aligned to make his case one of the rare successes.

"It's phenomenal," said Dawkins. "It's, sort of, almost unreal."

First, his wife immediately came to his aid when it became clear something was wrong. She dialled 911 and quickly began CPR until advanced life support paramedics, Tom Watson and Ben Johnson, arrived.

Watson and Johnson had one of the region's few Lucas chest compression devices in their ambulance, allowing them to handle other things like driving to the hospital and administering drugs.

At St. Paul's Hospital, a team was ready and waiting for their arrival, with one of five $250,000 ECMO machines in Greater Vancouver at their disposal.

The machine, whose technical name is extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, allows doctors to bypass the patient's heart and lungs and keep blood flowing to the brain.

Dawkins was connected to the machine within an hour of his cardiac arrest, and he spent the next two days hooked up to the ECMO, until his heart was able to do its job again.

'Everything worked out so perfectly'

Brian Grunau is an emergency physician at St. Paul's. He has been involved in the ECMO program in the three years since paramedics, emergency room doctors and surgeons began hammering out a new set of procedures to apply in cases where the ECMO machines could be used for people who suffer cardiac arrest outside of the hospital.

According to Grunau, there are about 400 cardiac arrest cases in the Metro Vancouver area each year, and since the program began in 2016, the procedure with the Lucas chest compression machine and the ECMO has been tried about 25 times.

Grunau said Dawkins' is one of only four successful cases.

"I think what's special about this case is just that everything worked out so perfectly," said Grunau. "It's pretty amazing that you have a person who's been clinically dead for an hour, getting CPR, and then is [given this treatment], leaves hospital a week later with absolutely no ... side effects, any complications, any long-term damage."

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