By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
Sitting a few feet away and listening to greetings exchanged as Dave Banas walks to the Aurora Memorial Hospital of Burlington cardiac rehab unit, it sounds like old friends are reuniting.
“Oh my God, you look so good!”
“Thanks to you!”
“How’s my favorite staff?”
“Life is good. Life is good.”
For Banas and his wife, Jan, life nearly changed forever – nearly ended, in fact – on July 16, 2014. Staying in their summer home on Benedict Lake in Powers Lake, Banas suffered what is known in the medical world as a STEMI – an ST segment elevation myocardial infarction, or a heart attack with total blockage of an artery.
What followed – from Banas’ initial care from the Twin Lakes Rescue Squad through his cardiac rehabilitation – is what nurse Carolyn Dickmann called a perfect example of coordinated care.
“It’s just a neat representation of how it’s supposed to go,” Dickmann explained. “To see it work … it’s what we want.”
On the clock
For Banas, what started off as a normal summer day at the house quickly turned sour.
After cleaning up the beach area and raking the sand, Banas climbed a long set of stairs back up to the house. Sitting down next to Jan, he said he “felt a little pain, a little uneasy feeling.”
The situation escalated to nausea, “sweats like you wouldn’t believe,” and harsher pain in his chest. Having previously had a minor heart attack, Banas knew the symptoms … but it still took some time before Jan called 911.
Rescue arrived, and tried giving Banas nitroglycerin, which had helped before. When it didn’t relieve his symptoms, Twin Lakes hooked him up to EKG machine and started immediately into Aurora Memorial Hospital of Burlington.
And in a move that likely saved Banas’ life, the rescue personnel sent the EKG ahead to the hospital – giving the emergency room staff a heads up that a patient with a STEMI was on his way in. That enabled the ER staff to have Flight for Life already on its way to take Banas to St. Luke’s for placement of a stent.
“That is one of the most potentially life-threatening findings you can see on an EKG,” said Dr. James Pavlich. “You’re on the clock. The faster you can reverse the blockage, the better the patient does.”
Dave remembers arriving at the ER, and being moved from the gurney to the table.
“The last thing I remember is saying, ‘I can’t hold my arms up. Someone, please help me,’” he said. “I remember seeing someone in blue garb at my feet, and that was it.”
Working the code
Seeing a patient lose a rhythm on the heart monitor – and reacting to save that patient’s life – is, in ER parlance, called a code.
Nurse Jacquie Cates remembers looking at the monitor.
“You had squiggles,” Cates said to Dave, in a gathering of the ER staff and the Banas family recently. “It was bad squiggles. I think it was my high-pitch voice going, ‘Pavlich!’”
Dr. Pavlich was the “someone” in blue garb at Banas’ feet. He explained that the ER staff sees lots of codes, but very rarely do they actual witness someone go down the way Dave did.
Flight for Life was minutes out when Banas arrived at the ER. They stood by as the ER staff worked to re-establish Dave’s heart rhythm, unable to transport him until he was stable.
“We’d get him back, and then his rhythm would degrade,” Pavlich said.
In the middle of the chaos was Jan, who was brought back to be with her husband as the staff ran the code. She heard it called as she was signing her husband in at the front desk.
“I said to the woman at the desk, ‘That’s my husband, isn’t it,’” she explained. “She ignored me, and I knew it.”
But what followed involved bringing Jan – who had seen her own father suffer numerous heart attacks in the 1980s – back to the room where staff worked to save her husband’s life.
Lisa Wagner was the nurse assigned to be Jan’s support, to explain to her everything that was being done to her husband.
“The nurse knows exactly what’s going on,” Wagner said. “Just trying to use layman’s terms.”
Finally, the staff managed to get Banas stabilized – and out the door to Flight for Life. Roughly 20 minutes later, he arrived in St. Luke’s.
When he left Burlington, Wagner was worried.
“I knew we had really good CPR, but …”
The staff at St. Luke’s was no less concerned. Jan remembers speaking with Dr. Tanvir Bajwa, the doctor who handled placement of Dave’s stent.
“‘I can’t tell you if he’s going to be OK,’” Jan remembered being told. “We went through the whole night, we weren’t sure.”
Waking up
The next thing Dave remembers – after seeing Pavlich at his feet in the ER – was “waking up in St. Luke’s, with a tube down my throat.”
He was discharged from St. Luke’s two days later. Amazingly, he had come through the event with no brain damage, and was able to begin cardiac rehab almost immediately.
Less than a week after he left the Burlington ER on Flight for Life, he walked back into the ER, weighed down with fresh fruit and sandwiches.
“You just don’t see that,” Pavlich said. “One, just to see him again. I had been following his cath reports, and Flight for Life always calls us back.
“I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s a lucky guy,’” he added. “And then to see him standing there, looking half decent, a week after dying? To have someone that close, right there, giving us history, and then right in front of our eyes just crash … and then have that person walk in the door the next week.”
Cates recalls Banas “actually (having) a complexion,” remembering him the week before being the color of “cardiac grey” – a skin color indicative of major heart problems.
She wasn’t there to see it, though. She and Dickmann were off duty, and Wagner texted them a photo, with the catch tag, “You’re not going to believe this.”
Moving forward
Since then, the staff and the Banas family have remained in touch. Dave and Jan rode on the Aurora float in the Burlington Christmas parade in December 2014, and the couple always stops in when they come up from their permanent home in Valparaiso, Ind.
“We feel like we owe these people,” said Jan. Added Dave, “We DO owe these people.”
Since the nearly fatal day, Dave has regained a good portion of his heart function, thanks to cardiac rehab both at Aurora and then back in Indiana. He went from about 37 percent cardiac efficiency – normal is about 70 percent – to close to 60 percent.
Dave remembers being nervous in rehab, but he didn’t stay that way.
“It was encouraging,” he said. “I felt I was on the road to recovery, and they were very pleasant here.”
Now, Dave has had one knee replaced, and he’s working on the other. Life is about enjoying the time that he has.
Wagner, in the group setting with all the medical staff, asked Dave what changed after that day.
“We appreciate everything that much more,” Dave said. “I love my wife a lot more, and I show her that. Our daughter is getting married in October, and I’m looking forward to that … (and) grandchildren.”
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