Ray Schami, 72, has a knack for cheating death. He cheated it 30 years ago, when a brain abscess almost cut his life short. He cheated it again when a heart murmur led to an aortic valve replacement. And just four years ago, he survived a year in hospital on the brink of death, after operations to remove kidney and bladder stones resulted in hospital-transmitted infection.
But when he collapsed in cardiac arrest last week, during his regular Tuesday morning tennis game, Schami says he'd likely not have eluded death a fourth time, but for the quick actions of two fellow tennis players.
"If it wasn't for these two gentlemen, I was supposed to be a dead man," he said. "I was lucky."
The two gentlemen were Ron Kydd, 67, and John Stevenson, 72: both tennis players, both cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)-trained, and one Kydd with a portable defibrillator in his car.
Half an hour into a tennis set Tuesday morning, Nov. 3, Schami began to lean over, bracing his hands on his thighs, then fell to the ground.
"He was gasping," said Kydd. "And [his breathing] wasn't regular. It was sort of one big gasp and then something and then nothing. Nothing."
Stevenson dashed for his phone and called 9-1-1, and he and Kydd rolled Schami onto his back and started doing CPR, trading off between them.
Kydd said that he'd done his training a few years ago and was able to remember the counting for the breaths and chest compressions. And Stevenson says that as a fitness instructor and personal trainer, he has done CPR training pretty regularly over the last decade or so.
"We agreed on [how to do] it," Kydd said. "We knew what to do. And John was really good at it. I didn't feel confident at all because I'd never done it and [I thought], 'Oh my God, what do you do?' but it worked, didn't it?"
Meanwhile, Kydd and Stevenson had a sense of time ticking by as they waited for paramedics and firefighters to arrive.
"I was talking to the dispatcher and saying, 'When are they coming?' and she said, 'Time will seem longer than it really is.' So I think they were there within five, six or seven minutes," Stevenson said.
Before emergency services arrived, though, Kydd and Stevenson escalated their interventions.
"After a few minutes, when it was obvious that Ray's pulse was weak if it was present at all it was so hard to tell, because we're panicking I went out to the car while John continued the CPR, and I got the defibrillator that my wife and I carry in the car," Kydd said. "We carry it because we live in Roberts Creek and it's 15 minutes from an ambulance, if you're lucky."
Kydd calls the defibrillator "foolproof" and explained that the box which contains pads that attach to a person's chest in order to administer a shock gives voice commands to talk a rescuer through the process.
"The first thing it says is, 'Be calm.' Well, no chance of that," Kydd said wryly. "And then it tells you to check the airways and the various steps you're supposed to do, including attaching the pads to the person's chest, which I did. And then it analyzes. It says, 'Analyzing, analyzing.' And then it said, 'Shock recommended,' and 'Stand back.' And so at that time I pushed the button and gave the shock."
Kydd administered two separate shocks, between rounds of CPR, and then paramedics and firefighters arrived and continued working on Schami.
"Two or three times, they said to us we saved his life," Kydd said.
Sechelt ambulance unit chief Roger Munn said that Stevenson and Kydd's interventions and particularly good quality CPR, started almost immediately helped give Schami the best possible outcome.
"In my opinion, the fact that someone started CPR immediately and the fact that someone had a defibrillator on scene, I think it made the outcome for this gentleman 100 per cent better than if they didn't have it," Munn said.
Munn said that CPR training, in particular, is very important in a rural community like the Sunshine Coast, where ambulances serve vast areas and delays can be longer than in a dense urban area.
Paramedics took Schami to St. Mary's Hospital until he could be transferred by helicopter to St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, where he was put in a medically-induced coma for 24 hours. He had a defibrillator implanted and was released from hospital Saturday, Nov. 14.
Now, he says, he's still feeling weak, but is counting his blessings that his heart attack happened in the right place, near the right people.
"I live alone so I could have been alone and had this heart attack and have been found a week or so later by neighbours," he said. "[My children] would have been concerned [when they hadn't heard from me as usual] and my neighbours would have walked in to find me dead."
