NOBODY DIES ON THE DANCE FLOOR
“Nobody dies on the dance floor.”
It was one of the very first lessons I taught to my adult beginner students. It offered a calm reassurance to my anxious - no, downright terrified humans - who had miraculously talked themselves into taking a beginning salsa dance class.
Truth. I believed it.
* * *
I am alone in the Emergency Room, the only sentient person in a small room standing next to a body that has tubes running in and out of it. A body that an hour ago was on stage finishing the final rehearsal for its debut dance performance.
I stand surrounded by the rhythmic swooshing sounds of the ventilator, the beeping of the heart monitor. The body is still. I reach up and place my hand on it. The doctor left me alone with it after he told me that the body’s chance of survival was 25%. It would depend on whether it would survive air evacuation to another hospital sixty miles away.
* * *
Jeff and I had so much in common. We both grew up in Southern California. We were both dentists, in fact he was my patient. We went to the same Catholic parish. We were the same age. When he decided to come to my weekly dance class, I was so very happy to have him.
He was one of my favorite students, because although he struggled trying to get his body to do what he expected it to do, he was good-natured about when it didn’t. Best of all, he was able to laugh about his shortcomings. And he loved dancing, in spite of his self-perceived inadequacies. He had gained enough confidence from the class that he was enthusiastically preparing to do the father-bride dance in a few months with his daughter Jessica.
His 92 year old father, Bill, came to dance class with Jeff. It was a great outing for Bill because he was a dancer. Bill danced all his life. After his wife passed he would go out twice a week dancing. Bill was slowing down now, but would watch the lessons and clap along with the beat. Sometimes one of the women would dance with him before or after class, and Bill would be grinning from ear to ear.
Jeff kept at it, and made it to almost every lesson for a couple of years. When our group decided to put together a choreographed routine Jeff joined the team. We scheduled a performance at a festival to be held in the Nevada Theater. We had our work cut out for us. We learned the routine and practiced it over a course of three months.
When the big day arrived, we were prepared, but we all had a pretty good dose of adrenalin flowing. We practiced for a couple hours at a team member’s house, took a dinner break and met backstage at the theater at 6 p.m.
We were dressed in our new outfits, and for the first time admired ourselves for looking like a team. Just before the doors opened we were allowed to rehearse on stage with the theater sound and lighting. The first run through was a bit choppy, the second one much better. We were about to begin our third and final when I heard a thud behind me.
I turned around and Jeff was on the floor.
I didn’t see him go down, but I assumed he had tripped and fallen forward. He was unconscious. I thought he perhaps had fainted and hit his head, causing him to black out.
I quickly went to him, and shook his shoulder. “Jeff, Jeff, are you all right?”
There was no response.
Quickly I rolled him over on his back with the help of my dance team members. I tipped his head back and opened his airway. There were no breaths. I repositioned his head further back, still nothing. It had been less than a minute. I gave him two breaths, observing his chest rising.
I checked for a carotid pulse and could not find one. Another team member searched for his pulse and could not find one either. I told someone to call 911. I started chest compressions.
I was doing both breathing and chest compressions, and a man stepped in and offered to do the compressions. It seemed like an eternity before help arrived, but in reality it was less than four or five minutes. Jeff’s teammates were encouraging him, saying “Come on Jeff, you can do this. Come on buddy, take some breathes. Come on Jeff!”
I kept up the breathing. At a certain point he gasped for air, perhaps two minutes into it, and so that gave me some hope that filling his lungs was helping his brain to survive the lack of oxygen. But there was no pulse, and he was not breathing.
Several off-duty EMT’s arrived at the 4-5 minute point. As my partner and I continued, they hooked up the defibrillator that was located in the theater lobby. They attached three electrode pads on his now exposed chest. The machine detected no heartbeat. We backed away. Jeff’s body jolted off the floor as the defibrillator sent 3000 volts through the electrodes. The defibrillator analyzed his status, and determined another shock was needed. Again Jeff’s body jolted off the floor. Still no pulse.
“Come on Jeff, you can do this. We’re with you Jeff. Take a breath for us.”
After a third shock, an ambulance crew arrived. Three techs working simultaneously started an IV line, applied a pressurized oxygen mask, and attached new leads on Jeff’s chest. The EKG showed a flat line.
No pulse.
They had everyone back away. Jeff’s body jolted now for a fourth time. This time there was a pulse. For a moment there was a wave of relief, but within a few moments, the pulse was gone. His heart, and our hearts - all were flat lines. Everyone knew this was very, very bad after two more jolts.
No pulse.
I was on the sidelines watching this, thinking - how many shocks can a human take? The repeated shocks seemed to be done in hopeless desperation. They gathered Jeff’s body onto the gurney and wheeled it outdoors to the waiting ambulance. He was gone.
I found my wife Maria who was sitting in the theater watching the drama unfold. The sadness in her face, the tears welling from the corner of her eyes I will never forget. Jeff’s dad Bill was sitting next to her. Jeff’s family could not come for the performance, but Bill was there. Bill, age 92, sat impassively and silently next to my wife. I had know way of knowing if Bill knew what was happening, and if he did, there was no reaction that I could read in his face.
What happened next was a step across the boundaries of normal life into surrealism. I was suddenly in a Fellini movie. People who had tickets for the event were impatiently demanding why the show was starting late. The organizer of the event came up to me - the leader of our dance team - and choosing her words very carefully asked me if we wanted to go ahead with our act. This seemed to me like a rather incongruous distortion of the adage “the show must go on.” . In spite of the extraordinary circumstances, my mind was clear on that question. No, we’re done. Sorry, ma’m no dancing tonight. The realization hit me that I was the responsible person to take care of Jeff, and his father.
I drove to the hospital with Maria and Bill. Several in our group were trying separately to contact Jeff’s wife and family, but without success. We walked into the ER, introduced ourselves to the nurse. Maria ,Bill, and I sat in a waiting area. I tried to contact Jeff’s family, again no luck. After about fifteen minutes a doctor came out to speak with me, the heir apparent next of kin.
He explained that Jeff was unconscious but stable. The machines were taking care of his breathing, and his heartbeat. But his condition was very serious. His chances of surviving were unknowable, but grim. He needed to be life-flighted to a major hospital, and he could easily expire during that transfer. Since his family was not present, he said if I wanted I could go be with Jeff.
I told Maria what the doctor had told me. I asked Bill if he had his other son’s phone number in his wallet. Yes, he gave me an aged, wrinkled card with a phone number. I called the number, and I got his brother on the line. I explained the situation, and told him to call the family to the hospital immediately. I left Maria sitting with Bill.
The nurse ushered me quietly into the curtained corner where the body ly.
It looks like Jeff. But somehow it is not Jeff, my friend. It is a body. A body struggling silently to become a person again. I stand next to it. I brush the gray hair back off its face, feeling cold dry skin. The only motion is the respirator, pumping up and down like an accordion. The other buzzes and beeps, and the sound of modulated voices in the distance creates a dreamlike haze. Is this real? Is this happening?
I sense the struggle of the Jeff with the body.
I put one hand on Jeff’s shoulder, and the other hand on Jeff’s forehead. I whisper a prayer, for healing, for a miracle. Then I talk to Jeff, as if he were sitting across the table from me at the coffee shop where we would meet some Sundays after Mass.
“Well, you know Jeff, you have a big day coming up… Jessica’s wedding. The whole family is going to be there. And you will too. Because you’ve got that dance to dance, just the two of you. You know. The one that you have been working on. Imagine what it will feel like, dancing with your daughter. Think of all those years of her waiting for her day. And the two years you spent learning to dance that dance. It will be so beautiful to see her smile, to see all your family together celebrating together. So that’s the mission, Jeff. Get well. Get better. Dance your dance.”
I spent another fifteen minutes with Jeff, and we talked about a lot of other things as well. Good things, things to look forward to. The doctor came by and told me a helicopter was on the way.
Finally at long last Jeff’s wife, son and daughter arrived, and I quietly slipped out of the room as they all crowded around the bedside Jeff’s daughter took over her Grandpa Bill. I drove Jeff’s son back to the theater and dropped him off at Jeff’s car, which he drove back to the hospital.
By the time I came back to the hospital, the helicopter was on the pad. The doctor had told Jeff’s wife Judy that there was only 25% of saving his life even if he made it to the hospital. Judy said to send him on the helicopter.
I went home, took a hot shower and thought about all that had happened. I prayed, never stopped praying, for Jeff, Judy, Bill, and his family. I figured that was all that was left to do.
* * *
The next day I received a phone call from Judy. Jeff was alive. He made it down to Mercy Hospital in Sacramento, and had emergency surgery that night. They implanted a defibrillator on his heart, which could restart his heart immediately if it were to stop.
Over the following days, the news just kept coming, and it was all unbelievably good news. He’s awake. He’s talking. He’s up. He’s cranky and wants to go home.
On the Friday, almost a week since his heart stopped beating, I happened to be in Sacramento. I called Judy on the spur of the moment, and asked if the nurses would allow visitors. She asked, and told me I could come.
There was Jeff, sitting up in bed. He was talking with a bit of a gravelly voice, and his chest was sore. He said he didn’t remember anything about the whole event. Not the practice session, not the theater, not the hospital, and certainly not the helicopter ride.
Other than that memory loss, he was right on top of what the doctors and nurses had told him. In fact he had a pretty good grasp of the physiology of the whole affair. His potassium had tested at almost none, and the cardiologist thought that could have triggered cardiac arrest. He would need to have his implanted defibrillator monitored, and was grounded from driving for six months.
A few days later he went home. Two months later he danced with his daughter Jessica at her wedding. And the best part of it all… I can tell my dance students not to worry when they venture out for the first time. Because nobody dies on the dance floor. Not on my watch.
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