Last month the Register reported on Dale Erb, who, after a string of heart ailments over the years, was outfitted with a Zoll Medical LifeVest — an external defibrillator designed to administer a series of electrical jolts to Erb’s body in the event of sudden cardiac arrest. Last month, the vest was merely a precaution. Dale’s heart was stable; the device had not been tested. Just over a week ago, however, the vest was called into action when the LaHarpe resident succumbed to a major episode. “I did everything but flatline,” recalled Erb, who credits the device with saving his life.
Late one recent Friday night, Maria Erb lay next to her husband in bed. She wanted to chat before falling asleep. But, turning to face him, she found herself staring into a pair of eyes that no longer registered the world. “When I looked at him then, there was just nobody there.”
Rewind the tape a few minutes. Maria had climbed into bed a while after midnight. Dale was to join her shortly. On his way back from the bathroom, Dale leaned down to kiss his wife and tell her he loved her.
“Then he walked around the bed, got in and was lying facing me,” remembered Maria, “because we always lay facing each other to visit for a few minutes, and then we get comfortable.
“But as soon as his head hit the pillow, his box went off.” Dale’s LifeVest is connected to a small monitor, which intones a series of loud warnings if the device detects a life threatening irregularity in the subject’s heartbeat. “The box was saying ‘Patient in distress. Patient in distress.’ I said, ‘Dale, do you hear your box?’ His eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t there.”
Maria went round the bed and dialed 911. At the same time, she turned Dale from his side to his back. He was still non-responsive.
“I don’t remember what I said exactly to the 911 lady. I do recall saying, ‘This is Maria Erb. My husband’s heart defibrillator box is going off. I need an ambulance.’”
Maria held Dale, and continued talking to him. “‘Dale, you have to wake up. You have to turn your box off.’”
Still on the phone, Maria heard the device issue new, more urgent instruction: ‘Step away from the patient.’
“And so I lifted my hands up,” remembered Maria. “I didn’t touch him.” That’s when the LifeVest delivered its first strategic burst of electricity into her husband’s torso. “I will tell you he raised up eight to 10 inches off the bed.”
Still, Dale didn’t respond. Maria returned to his side. “I was touching him, telling him ‘Dale, you have to wake up and turn off your box.’ Toward the end of this, before it zapped him a second time, I just told him — well, you know how it is, I talked to him.
“But then the box told me again: ‘Step away from the patient.’
“That one hit him hard and that was when he started coming out of it. But he was slow coming out of it. He remembers me saying, ‘You have to turn the box off.’ He got it turned off three seconds before it would have zapped him a third time. … And that’s when I told him, ‘Lay still, do not move, do not do anything.’ Because if I know him he would have tried to get up and walk out to meet the ambulance.”
DALE allows his disjointed memories of those few minutes to condense in his mind. “My eyes were open, I know that. I could hear her on the telephone. I heard her say, ‘My husband’s box is going off.’ And then somewhere along the way, probably the second time, I felt the zap.”
The Zoll Corporation offers a sedate description of what happens when the electrodes in the vest are activated: the LifeVest, they say, delivers a “treatment shock.” Dale prefers to call a spade a spade: “I told my wife and the ambulance attendants, ‘I have either just been shot or else I have been kicked in the chest by one mean-ass-mother mule.’
Either way, the Erbs are confident, as are Dale’s doctors and nurses — the LifeVest saved his life. (Of course, the indispensable human ingredient on the night was Maria.)
Dale was flown from Allen County Regional Hospital to St. Francis, in Wichita, the next day. There, an internal defibrillator was connected to his heart, and Dale was freed of the vest.
“When they said, ‘Ok, you’re going to surgery now, you can take off the vest, I actually asked them, ‘Are you sure?’ I just had the thought: ‘This vest saved my life, it is my life. Can I take it off?’
The surgery was a success. He was home the next day. Today, Dale sports a plum-colored two-inch incision scar on the upper left side of his chest, the main evidence of the operation.
THE HEART — what a former poet laureate once called that “legendary muscle that wants and grieves / the pump of thrills and troubles” — has been for Dale Erb the site of more troubles than thrills of late.
The Erbs’ dining room table is thickly layered with medical bills and hospital cards. “It’s going to be horrid,” says Maria, contemplating the final tally. These days, when the phone rings at their modest LaHarpe home, it’s very often someone wanting to discuss Dale’s health or his medical costs. There’s very little let-up.
“Somewhere on this roller coaster,” reflects Dale, “there just has to be some flat track.”
The couple’s anxieties are smoothed in large measure by the comfort they take in each other.
They still chat before falling asleep. “My worst fear after this,” admits Maria, “was going to bed. Because the last picture I had, you know, was of him laying there. My fear this last week has been that I would look into his eyes again and find nothing.”
The new device won’t reverse the organ’s weak palpitations or cure its muted currency, but should the tenuous mechanics of his heart give out while he’s sleeping — and if his wife is watching — what she’ll witness this time, the doctors have told her, “is just a little bump go up in his chest,” a sign of the tiny device in action, rescuing for the pair a little more time.
