PITTSBURGH — A woman published a blog post on Huffington Post Thursday nearly a year after her partner suffered a massive heart attack while on a trip in Pittsburgh to thank the two strangers who likely saved his life.
Rebecca Bratspies wrote that her partner, Allen, was in Pittsburgh on March 31, 2014, with cellist Kate Dillingham to perform his musical composition, “Three Fantasies for Cello and Piano.”
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After a celebratory dinner following the performance, Allen collapsed. Rebecca Bratspies wrote that he was with friends who did not know CPR. Out of nowhere, two strangers appeared and began performing CPR.
"But for them, Allen would undoubtedly have died that night," she wrote in her Huffington Post blog. "It turns out Pittsburgh is a pretty good place to have a massive heart attack."
According to Bratspies, EMTs arrived at the scene within five minutes and transported him to UPMC Shadyside Hospital, where he remained in a coma for a month in the intensive care unit.
Once Allen was medically stable, Bratspies returned with him to New York.
His coma stretched on for another week until one day his physical therapist asked him if he wanted to walk. He nodded his head and whispered, “Yes.”
"Just like that, his coma was over," Bratspies wrote in her Huffington Post blog. "I cried. The therapist cried. I texted our parents, his ICU nurses and then posted to Facebook."
Allen was hospitalized for a total of seven months and still faces some daily struggles. However, the wheelchair he came home in “sits, gathering dust.”
“Our daughter has a loving and engaged father, I have my partner. His personality and intelligence remain largely intact. We don't have our old life back, but what we have is pretty good,” Bratspies wrote.
Bratspies noted that each year more than 350,000 Americans suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and that the vast majority die. Bystander CPR, she wrote, can make the difference between life and death.
Bratspies ended her Huffington Post blog entry with a list of thank-yous to those who helped Allen on his road to recovery, including the two strangers she hopes to meet:
“We are so grateful to the doctors and nurses who gave Allen the care he needed, to the EMTs who got there so quickly, to the therapists who helped him to a hard-won independence, to our family and friends who helped us in every way imaginable, and of course, to those two anonymous strangers in the dark alley in Pittsburgh. I hope you read this and know how grateful we are.”
To read Bratspies' full Huffington Post blog, CLICK HERE.
WPXI
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