One Man Becomes a Believer the Hard Way

The song was one of those swinging tunes from the 1940s that never failed to send Joseph Secco dashing onto the dance floor. He whirled around with his wife, Nancy, until he was dead on his feet.

“I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s sit the next one out.”

He flopped into his chair with all the grace of a stuffed laundry bag flung from the rafters. Nancy thought he was joking, until she noticed him gasping for breath and flailing his arms, the look on his face that said he was already gone.

“Somebody help!” she shouted. The band stopped playing.

The Seccos were in the lounge of the Stardust Hotel. It was a Saturday night in Las Vegas, and they had come to hear Dave Coady and his band, a favorite of the Seccos since they’d moved from New York after Joe’s retirement from the city health department.

A couple at the next table were the first to rush over. The woman gave Joe mouth-to-mouth while the man pushed on his chest with such urgent intensity he snapped four of Joe’s ribs.

Somebody at the bar radioed the security office: “Man down in the lounge.” Casino guard James Alexander grabbed an oxygen tank and a portable defibrillator and ran over.

Alexander, a medic in Vietnam, recognized Joe’s condition immediately. “No pulse. Not breathing,” he thought. “It’s a dead person.”

Alexander turned on the little defibrillator. He stuck the two electrode patches on Joe’s chest and pressed the button that said “analyze.” The machine began studying Joe’s heart, which was in a quivering, useless mode called ventricular fibrillation.

“Shock advised,” the machine announced in an androgynous voice.

“Clear,” Alexander said loudly, meaning for everybody to stand back. He pressed the shock button and Joe’s body shuddered.

Nancy listened, hardly looked, gauging the prospects for Joe’s return by the sounds of the people around him. They were shocking him again, meaning the first one hadn’t worked.

Then she heard something that made her shiver. A door opened to another world, and a cold breeze blew through her bones.

“He’s back,” somebody said. “We got him back.”

*

Clark County firefighters decided to lobby for defibrillators in casinos because they found what paramedics everywhere find: People who suffer cardiac arrest are usually dead before rescuers reach them.

Researchers spent months trying to convince casinos to take part, but most were afraid of getting sued if they let lay people defibrillate dying customers. A few finally agreed.

Under the pilot project that ran from May 1997 to January, casino personnel saved the lives of seven of the 10 people who had suffered ventricular fibrillation. Secco was one of them.

“It turned out that our survival rate was twice that of the best places in the country,” said Dr. Terence D. Valenzuela of the University of Arizona, a study co-author.

Now, the machines are becoming standard equipment at Vegas casinos. For James Alexander, Secco’s survival, he said, was a milestone victory in a once-lopsided war.

“It was nice to win,” he said. “Before we had this equipment, we lost a lot.”

*

Joe Secco doesn’t remember much about the night at the Stardust last August. He just remembers staggering toward his table and waking up with a quadruple bypass.

Secco, 72, now has his own defibrillator, a small one implanted in his chest. He has become a proponent of putting the portable devices in all public places. So has his wife.

The couple recently celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary, which they consider a gift. “I thought I had lost him,” said Nancy. “I really did.”

After he got out of the hospital, the couple went back to the Stardust, back to see Dave Coady. The bandleader and the band and the waiters and regulars were stunned, naturally.

Everyone had the same reaction: He’s back.