Second life

Just the affirmation needed by a man who almost lost every sensation. For the 22nd time, Marietta’s Bruce Gilbert started the traditional run through the marrow of Atlanta this July 4th.

For the 21st time, he finished.

Oh, lucky, lucky man. A year ago he was all but dead on the curb, heart stopped, lips turning a necrotic blue. Now look at him, back in the race in both fact and symbol.

And better than the personal satisfaction of completing the 6.2-mile course, of feeling the proof of life once more flooding to the surface, was what awaited just beyond the finish. Greeting him were the family and friends who make a life worth living. Many were strangers a year ago, and angels today.

“I’m still trying to figure out the whole story myself,” he said during the post-race party, speaking of the past year and his tango with mortality. “I’m getting closer. It’s a good story. It has a great ending.”

Death caught up to Gilbert at the two-mile mark of the 2013 Peachtree Road Race.

One step he was glancing at his watch, measuring himself against the passing seconds: 19:19...19:20.

Just an OK pace, he thought. Maybe I can make up a little time on this downhill stretch.

The next step, he was dead. Just that quickly, in the time it takes to flip a light switch, his heart went as dark and quiet as a foreclosed home.

Gilbert discovered nothing special that last July 4th about dying. Anybody can do it.

For him, there was no pain. There was no fear. No warning. No illumination of a distant light. Just an instant loss of being, a black hole where all his memories used to be.

A hard fall

Gilbert, a Cobb County landscaper by trade, never made a big production out of running the Peachtree. It was as with so many runners in the world’s largest 10K, just something to do to mark the holiday. He never even trained much for it, really. Why? He plays ALTA tennis and, combined with all the hours he worked outdoors on the job, he was in great shape. He looked and felt much younger than his 54 years.

The sun was just beginning to show itself that morning of the Fourth last year when he kissed his wife, Carol, goodbye. She rolled over and went back to sleep. He slipped out the door. The most eventful of days begin in the most uneventful ways.

At around 7:35 a.m., he lurched to a start in his assigned wave of humanity. It was a misty morning, humid, but not as oppressive as the Fourth can be.

“I wasn’t laboring. I knew I wasn’t going quickly, but I expected that. I know each year I get a little slower,” Gilbert said.

As he approached Wesley Road, an intersection marked by Christ the King Cathedral, Gilbert grew warm beneath the hat he wore as protection against the rain, and he tore it off his head. A little more than four miles to go.

It happened there at the foot of the church. There are far worse places to die.

Jimmy Locklear saw it happen no more than three feet in front of him. When you volunteer as a course monitor for a race you’ve known and loved for decades, you expect a front-row seat to a joyful holiday spectacles — not a life and death drama.

Had he only known Gilbert’s heart was about to stop, Locklear could have almost reached out and caught him.

Face down on the asphalt, his head bleeding from a nasty gash, Gilbert shuddered for a moment and then went ominously still. Not even the faintest sign of breathing. In the immediate confusion, no one was quite sure what to do. So there Gilbert lay, as an Atlanta policeman radioed for help.

Talk to me, sir. Talk to me! another officer called out to the fallen runner.

Just steps away from Gilbert was Father Richard Morrow. As he walked toward the fallen runner, he reached for the oil he always kept in his pocket. The 83-year-old priest bent and quickly dabbed the blessed ointment on the bald spot on the back of Gilbert’s head and whispered the sacrament of the anointing of the sick:

“Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord, who frees you from your sin, save you and raise you up.”

Like answered prayers, the right people began to flock to Gilbert.

“God had his angels out there — with radar on,” says Gilbert’s wife, Carol.

Angels descend

Waking up to rain, Jayne Baskin seriously considered not even running the race. She sure didn’t belong anywhere near the front of the Peachtree pack based on her slow pace. But she and her daughter, Brittany Arnold, hated being trapped with the mob at the rear and ducked in among the earlier starters.

A nurse at Piedmont Hospital, Baskin, 60, recognized trouble at first glance. Her daughter, also a nurse at Piedmont, possessed the same instincts.

With precious seconds bleeding away, both jogged up to Gilbert and immediately began lending some purpose to the confusion.

Turn him over, uncross his legs, Baskin instructed the onlookers. Gilbert was starting to adopt a deathly blue tone.

At the same time, a general practitioner from Valdosta with a famous golfer’s name, Dr. Ben Hogan, arrived at the corner. He was running a great time. An audiobook — John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart, Discovering the Secrets of a Man’s Soul” — played though his ear buds.

He was, like most runners, utterly self-involved. Yet a disturbance on the street corner cracked his reverie and caught a corner of his eye.

Probably nothing. Ah, let’s check just to make sure this guy is OK, Hogan thought.

“I looked down and Bruce’s eyes were open, but there wasn’t anybody home,” Hogan remembered. No signs of breathing. No pulse. A former football player, a safety at South Carolina 20-plus years ago, Hogan took over the chest compressions, prompting the sleeping heart with a little more vigor. Nurse Baskin was at Gilbert’s head, giving aid and comfort.

Gilbert was aware of none of this. He was somewhere else, the least concerned person at the scene.

Andy Blake, a member of the Grady Hospital bicycle EMS unit who has worked the race route for more than a decade, was a block away, passing time talking to an Atlanta cop when he overheard the first call for help over the police radio. Instantly, he mounted up and pedaled like mad to the nearby scene.

Astride Gilbert’s chest, still trying to coax a heart back to life, Hogan looked up and saw Blake approach.

“My immediate thought was, I don’t need a darn bike,” he said. “What are we going to do, put him on the handlebars and take him to the hospital?”

But from the bike saddlebags, Blake pulled out a small hospital’s worth of goodies. A respirator bag. Oxygen. A fluid IV kit. And most importantly, a portable automated external defibrillator (AED), the device used to shock a fluttering heart back to life.

If asked at the time, none of those working on Gilbert would have given him a nickel for his chances. It’s not like TV, where the dying hero is routinely restarted like an old car attached to jumper cables.

First, they had to coax from Gilbert some sign of cardiac life. The AED won’t fire otherwise. And there was no hint of activity.

Finally, the AED sensed the slightest rhythm and signaled the attendants. Clear! A jolt reached into Gilbert’s chest.

Nothing. No response.

The team kept working as the AED recycled and went into a two-minute pause. The machine sensed another quiver from Gilbert’s heart and advised another shock. Clear!

By this point, Blake was poised to inject stimulants into Gilbert’s heart in a last desperate attempt to kick-start it. Just as he was ready to administer, Gilbert began coming to life.

His brain had been deprived of oxygen for nearly 10 minutes. In his confusion, he began thrashing, battling, in his mind, for survival. He vomited on the pavement.

A few minutes later, Gilbert was loaded into an ambulance for a ride to Piedmont Hospital that he still does not remember.

The curtain on the drama might have closed right there, with the sound of sirens disappearing in the distance. As Gilbert was rushed to nearby Piedmont Hospital, all those who had played lifesaver for a few precious minutes — the nurses, the doctor, the paramedic, the priest — were left in an adrenaline haze.

“Everybody kind of shook hands and said thanks, appreciate your help and went their own way,” the Valdosta doctor, Hogan, said.

“Within a few minutes, people were running by with no idea what had just happened,” the race monitor, Locklear, remembered.

But this was just the intermission before the next act.

Not why, but who?

The paramedic answers hundreds of calls in a career and never gets to know the person he drops at the hospital door. Doctors and nurses heal and move on to the next case. The priest is consumed by his own flock. And the passerby passes on by.

Once in a lifetime, though, maybe they all encounter that case they cannot shake, that one person who will not let them ever forget that there is someone still in this world thanks to them.

After finishing the race, Hogan called the Piedmont emergency room. “I expected to have them say either he died en route or he had a massive heart attack and had to be put on a ventilator,” the doctor said. He knew the stats. A cardiac event like Gilbert’s is fatal nearly 90 percent of the time.

Instead, he received word that Gilbert was responding well. And, here, someone wants to talk to you. It was Gilbert’s wife, Carol, who in the rush to reach the hospital hadn’t yet had time to absorb the seriousness of her husband’s episode. Hogan supplied her with some of the first details of her husband’s trip to death and back.

The pedaling paramedics — Blake had been joined at the scene by another, Robert Meyers — were curious, too. As they rode behind the Peachtree stragglers toward the finish line, both Blake and Meyers passed the entrance to Piedmont Hospital. Curiosity pulled them to the right, toward the emergency room entrance. From there they were led to Gilbert’s room in Cardiac Care, where for the first time Gilbert met a couple of the lead actors in the drama of putting him back together again. Groggy and still confused, he thanked them as best he could.

That night, Gilbert was on the phone, calling Hogan. The doctor was driving back to Valdosta, with his cell off. When he powered back up, there was a message waiting.

“I told my wife, ‘You want to hear something really weird? Listen to this message. This guy was dead six hours ago.’ It was really kind of surreal,” Hogan said.

Medical science failed to give Gilbert a precise explanation of what happened to him that day. All the tests revealed nothing significantly wrong with his heart, and no arterial blockage. Dehydration was the best guess. To be safe, he agreed to have a small defibrillator implanted near his shoulder, the wire reaching down to his heart. Designed to give an automatic jolt if the heart stops again; it has yet to fire.

Otherwise, Gilbert has next to no interest in divining the why. It is the who that fascinates him. He began slowly knitting together the net of those who saved him while still early in his six-day hospital stay. And he wouldn’t stop for months afterward.

Acts of gratitude

A little more than a month after Gilbert was released from the hospital, he had lunch with Locklear, the volunteer race monitor who had witnessed him fall. An Atlanta writer and consultant, Locklear was so churned up by the drama that played out before him that he immediately went home and wrote an 11-page account of it. Now, he shared those details with the man whose name he only recently learned.

Gilbert hungered for any scrap of information, to both fill in the blanks of his memory and perhaps find one more person to thank.

No one was going to get out of this unappreciated.

But there’s the challenge: How do you properly thank those who brought you back to life? The Gilberts chose a steady stream of personal gestures.

One night they took Blake, the paramedic and the mother-and-daughter nurses out to dinner. He got chocolates. The women got flowers.

For Father Morrow, a cake, hand-delivered to the church.

Last November, the Gilberts drove to Valdosta to take the doctor, Hogan, and his family to dinner.

It wasn’t just those who came to his rescue on the corner of Peachtree and West Wesley who are targets of gratitude. The couple has made several pilgrimages to Piedmont Hospital, laden with sweets, to visit the staff at the emergency room, the cardiac care unit, the main floor nurses, even the plastic surgeon who stitched up the gash on Gilbert’s head.

Around Christmas time, the Gilberts sent out a little gift to their circle of angels, hats personalized with the message: Life is Good.

Return to the scene

Gilbert’s decision to run the Peachtree this year was as much about all those who helped him as it was about him. Certainly, there was a prideful part of him that wanted to finish a race so traumatically interrupted a year ago. He had been awarded a coveted 2013 Peachtree T-shirt in the hospital, along with another shirt signed by his doctors and nurses at Piedmont. But he wanted to truly earn one.

Still, meeting any personal goal wouldn’t have meant half as much if he couldn’t share it with those who made it possible.

Before she’d completely sign off on the idea of her husband running again, Carol had wrested multiple promises from him that he’d take it easy. Part of his more leisurely pace included a full stop where he went down in 2013.

When Gilbert approached the corner of Peachtree and West Wesley this Fourth of July, a reunion broke out. Waiting for his arrival, nurse Baskin was the first to pick him out of the crowd. Accompanied by her daughter, Arnold, she ran into the street to hug him. Lining up to embrace Gilbert was the volunteer race monitor, Locklear, working the same post as a year ago, and paramedic Blake, his bike parked at the corner. They led him to the very spot of his cardiac arrest, only this time they stood smiling and posed for a photo.

“I’m a very lucky guy,” Gilbert said, before returning to the race, Baskin and her daughter running alongside him for a few blocks.

About 90 minutes or so after he started — he’s not living this race through the clock any more — Gilbert crossed the finish at Piedmont Park. He looked like he could have gone another six miles.

Scarcely did he slow down through the T-shirt line and on to Park Tavern where he and Carol hosted a small gathering for friends, both old and new.

Some who even had reason to thank him.

“I think in retrospect, Bruce dying and living not only affected him and the way he sees things, but also everybody around him,” Hogan, the doctor, said. “Even the people who are around that sort of thing on a regular basis.”

“You’ve got all these people doing something crazy — running six miles in the middle of July in the South — and they’re stopping to do something great for somebody they don’t know,” Arnold, the nurse, said. “It was such an amazing experience to be a part of.”

For his part, Gilbert marked the anniversary of his near passing with smiles and hugs and cake. Happy re-birth day.

“There are a lot of horrible things that go on out there. I was in no pain. It was good ending. I met a lot of great people. It was a good experience,” he said.

A person might get the idea that almost dying was one of the best things that ever happened to Bruce Gilbert.