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COVER STORY
LISA WILES
Twice a lifesaver Ken Sturtz
W
hen Lisa Wiles replays the events of April 9, 2020, as she has many times, she’s reminded that things easily could’ve ended differently. She worked a half day, napped, ran errands and then showered. It was her brother’s birthday so she and her husband, Dan Wiles, were about to eat dinner before joining a Zoom call with family. If her schedule had been different or her husband had been somewhere else, say in the backyard with their dogs, no one would’ve been there when he went into cardiac arrest. “When something like this happens, everything has to be perfect for there to be a good outcome,” Wiles says. “All that stuff had to happen exactly perfectly and did for him.” The couple were late for the Zoom call and had thrown together a quick dinner to eat before joining the virtual get together. Lisa remembers her husband took his food into the living room of their Marcellus home and she was getting ready to follow. She heard him swear and assumed he was watching television. “I just walked out there and he was gone,” she says. “He was sitting on the couch and he was making these horrible breathing sounds.” For a moment Wiles thought her husband was choking, but she quickly realized that wasn’t the problem. She slapped his face and shouted his name. No response. “His eyes were kind of looking somewhere else,” she says. “It’s like he wasn’t in there.” She darted for a phone. A 911 dispatcher heard the noises Dan was making and said she needed to start CPR. Lisa dragged him onto the floor and began chest compressions. She remembered where to place her hands from a CPR course she’d taken nearly two decades earlier.
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