Nov. 27--MILFORD -- Marc Medina will be feeling a special warmth today, and he has his fiancee and doctors at the Hospital of Saint Raphael to thank.
Medina might not have been able to share this year's Thanksgiving at all after his heart stopped last month and his brain went without oxygen for several minutes. But a new techn i q u e b r o u g h t his body temperature down to 89 degrees and helped prevent b r a i n d a m a g e , a n d n o w h e ' s back to running and working out.
T he futu r e looks so bright that he and his girlfriend of two y e a r s , J i l l i a n Trez, took a trip to New York three weeks ago to buy an engagement ring.
"It's a blessing just to be able to even be here," said Medina, 31. "They stated that the best-case scenario was that if I was going to be alive, that I was going to be a vegetable."
Medina's adventure began on a Saturday when Trez, waiting to take their Yorkshire terriers, Baisley and Chloe, for a walk, heard a strange noise and discovered Medina had collapsed in their home. Medina, who has a congenitally low heart rate, had gone into full cardiac arrest.
After being given cardiopulmonary resuscitation and rushed to Milford Hospital, Medina was taken to St. Raphael's, where Dr. Roger Elias and Dr. Mark Marieb decided to induce hypothermia, the first time the hospital had attempted the procedure.
"They put you on ice for 24 hours, and then there's another eight to warm up," said Trez. In fact, doctors literally use ice, as well as cooling blankets, to bring the body's core temperature down to a point where body functions slow down.
Elias, director of St. Raphael's medical intensive care unit, said brain cells begin to die after three minutes without oxygen. When he assessed Medina, he found his patient "was at high risk of death or persistent vegetative state," according to a statement issued by St. Raphael's.
Marieb, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist, said there were some tense moments while Medina was unconscious.
"We actually had to put a temporary pacemaker in him because his heart rate was too slow," he said. It had dropped to 20 beats per minute.
Marieb said a slow heart rate is really the only risk to the procedure.
"It really helps the brain," he said. "It slows the brain metabolism down. ... We don't know how it works, but we know it works."
After a tense weekend, Medina came out of his comatose state. Trez said that at first Medina had no short-term memory -- "It was like talking to a child." But he was clearly on the way back.
In order to treat his heart condition, Marieb implanted an automated defibrillator and pacemaker in Medina's chest. He said he, too, is surprised at how well Medina has recovered.
"Given the fact he was down for probably five minutes without initial CPR, he probably shouldn't have had brain function," he said.
"I'm thankful that he's alive and that we have the technology that we have today," said Trez, 28, who works in sales for Automatic Data Processing Inc.
Clearly, Medina is grateful, too.
"I'm 100 percent now," he said earlier this week. "I just got back from the gym. I'm running a couple miles a day," he said.
He said he'll be able to resume lifting weights once the doctors are sure his internal wiring is all set, and he'll return to his job as a correction officer at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield next week.
Now that they're officially engaged, the couple plans to wait a while to get married. Trez has a brother and sister who also are planning weddings. She and Medina also want to give themselves time to save up for the trip.
They're planning a "destination wedding" in St. Maarten in the West Indies, where it's sure to be nice and warm.
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