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Family and friends feared Mike Smith of Delta, Utah, would not survive. Instead, he walked out of a Salt Lake hospital almost as if nothing had ever happened to him. Doctors call his story "phenomenal."
Mike Smith, 45, was a man who kept dying, but those around him kept bringing him back.
"[I was] just having terrible chest pains, and you know, grabbing at my chest and hurting real badly. That's all I can remember about it," he said.
Smith had a massive heart attack at home. Then ER doctors at the hospital in Delta shocked his heart eight times. On board Life Flight from Delta to Provo, he was shocked and jolted again numerous times. Still no luck, even after doctors at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo opened the closed-off artery to his heart.
He was shocked again, multiple times. Despite the jolts, despite medications, with low blood pressure and continuous fibrillation, the heart was shutting down. Not much was left when he finally arrived at Intermountain Medical Center (IMC) in Murray.
Dr. Jim Revenaugh, a cardiologist at IMC, said, "So he was transferred up here for mechanical support of basically his impending death."
In one last attempt, a catheter was snaked up through his groin into his heart. It punctured a hole so blood with oxygen could be pumped from one chamber to his brain and other vital organs through a device called the PVAD.
Unlike other heart assist devices that are implanted inside the body, the PVAD, the pump itself, is placed outside the body in a strap just above the knee.
Smith was packed in ice to cool down the body. The outcome? Not only has he recovered, his heart has repaired itself. It's pumping normally. There's no brain damage; no damage at all! The temporary PVAD, which allowed his heart to rest and heal, has been removed.
"It's unexpected, definitely. It's phenomenal," he said.
In addition to PVAD, IMC is about to begin clinical trials on a new generation pump. But this one, at 25,000 rpm, is miniaturized, right inside the catheter itself.
But it's more than devices. Mike Smith is back home because a lot of people over a 150 mile journey just wouldn't let him slip away.
"I get a second chance and I get it because of the people that were put around me, the first breath that was pushed into me," he said.
Dr. Revenaugh says he hasn't seen another case in which a patient overcame such long odds and survived without either heart or brain damage.
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