What It's Like ... To Die on a Hockey Rink

On Nov. 7, 2022, I died.

I didn’t realize it at first. I began to learn what happened when, out of the depths of nowhere, a voice asked if I knew where I was. I struggled to produce my monosyllabic answer: “No.”

The voice responded: “You’re in the ICU. You had a heart attack during your hockey game last night. A player on the other team saved your life.”

I didn’t remember going to a game last night. The last thing I remembered­ … I couldn’t remember the last thing I remembered. I didn’t even know what a heart attack felt like.

I heard no more questions. There was only darkness, and my grandfather’s voice, singing a polka: “In heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here …” The voice modulated into something menacing, Luke Skywalker gone Joker, before I faded away. My sense of being alone in the dark stayed with me long after I realized I was in a room illuminated by artificial light.

My death occurred while I played beer-league hockey at the Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton, Oregon. My signs of life—breath, heartbeat, movement, the ability to perceive and form memories—left me. When I came back, I became fixated on the period I’d lost, what had happened to me and where I’d gone. It turned out there was more out there than I bargained for.

This is the forgotten story of my forgotten death.

I was rushed to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland and admitted to the ICU just after midnight. I had been unconscious when I hit the ice and remained so in the hospital. The doctors delayed emergency cardiac treatment because they thought my brain was dying and I was never coming back. The earliest notes in my medical chart were harrowing: “Patient was playing ice hockey when he had sudden death. Paramedic on another team did CPR and defibrillated him. This patient is unbelievably ill and has an extremely high risk of imminent life-threatening deterioration in multiple organ systems, some of which are, in fact, showing actual signs of overt failure.”

My official diagnosis was “ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) involving the left anterior descending (LAD) artery.” A STEMI is the kind of heart attack you don’t want. Sometimes they’re called massive heart attacks. 

I was in shock, my liver was tanking, I couldn’t breathe. The doctors homed in on my ‘nonverbal’ state. The word hypoxia occurred in the notes with alarming frequency. I was intubated. A nurse noted I had no advance directive or family or friends to consult about pulling the plug on me.

My cardiac arrest was caused by an almost-always-fatal total blockage of the LAD coronary artery. But the tests indicated that my brain was somehow functional. A stent was inserted, by way of my groin, to shore up the artery that failed: “Prognosis very guarded.” 

I stayed mysteriously unresponsive. “General appearance: comfortable, in no distress.” Improbably, almost nine hours after I collapsed, I began to “respond to commands.”

I remembered none of this. Some elemental part of me persisted, a trace of the thoughts that normally flowed through my pinball brain and from my vocal apparatus. The darkness in which I awoke unsettled me as much as the chasm into which I had fallen. I was roused by voices but didn’t see anyone speaking. I saw only a blackness—not the absence of light, but the absence of everything.I struggled to come back, each time willing myself to stay longer. I emerged as a head without a body from a rabbit hole where I had lost my sense of self.

When my juice came back on, I felt my parts turn on separately, out of sync. I wavered between consciousness and oblivion. On the cusp, I saw familiar faces rotting before I could identify them. I was heavily sedated. The voice asked more questions that I answered to its satisfaction, and it took me off life support.

My ex brought our two kids (my daughter, 14, and son, 15, hockey players both) to see me. I don’t remember their visit. My son said that my hair stood cartoonishly on end and that I said repeatedly that I couldn’t see and asked why the lights were off. The lights, he said, were on.

Eventually I saw tubes stuck in my chest, arms and groin, fossils of the emergency procedures. A blur of nurses and doctors treated me. One recurring note stood out: “Patient asked when he can play hockey again.”

I understood what had happened but had no memories to support the narrative. Instinctively, I grabbed my phone to call my mother. Maybe she would spark some dormant memories.

I stopped just before I tapped “Mom and Dad.” My mother, I remembered, had died 10 days before I had. A week earlier, my father briefly called to say she had passed. Crap luck and difficult times had prevented me from visiting my mother in Massachusetts during the last years of her life. A year ago, the last time I talked to her, she hadn’t known who I was. I put down the phone and cried.

My mother died after a succession of collapses. She was resuscitated repeatedly and left dangling until the next trip to the ICU. She rehabbed and never got better. I didn’t want to end up like my mother. I wanted to go out skating heel-to-heel like Canadian hockey star Sidney Crosby.

The doctors said my heart would be seriously, discernibly damaged. Best case, I’d need a defibrillator implanted. The darkness came back. Two more stents were inserted into my recalcitrant artery. A doctor said they would test my heart before deciding what came next, perhaps more procedures.

The next day, a doctor told me my heart was now, in fact, functioning normally. No scars or irregular blood flows. She was surprised, the only doctor who didn’t seem to have a prepared statement.Widow-maker: That’s another name for this species of heart attack, because of the low survival rate. You have a five per cent chance of living if you have one outside a hospital. I was at a hockey rink in the middle of the night. By dumb luck, I was 40 feet away from an expert at saving people from widow-makers.

I became obsessed with the 72-hour gap in my long-term memory and imagined what had happened. I remembered nothing of the game or the ensuing events. Then I remembered one thing: The rink taped all the games. I was morbidly thrilled. I had lived long enough to watch myself die.

On the night I went home, I obtained the recording of the game and watched it on my laptop. The video is grainy. A low mechanical hum permeates the footage. Players’ voices echo as if travelling through a metal tube. I can’t make out most of the words. The opposing team, wearing pink, just scored.

It was right at the 12:30 mark of the first period when it happened. A man skates toward centre ice. Right winger, No. 37 in grey, displays all my quirks and tics. I’m giddy as I watch on my laptop, a lingering effect of all the narcotics I had consumed. This poor guy—me, but not me—is about to go down. He should be lining up for the faceoff, but he goes off script. Puts his right hand to his face shield, crumples and proceeds into a slo-mo face-plant. He doesn’t even try to break his fall.

Other players look at the motionless winger and ask if he’s OK. A voice pierces the sonic murk: “We need a doctor.”

Something feels deeply wrong. I’m dissociated from the almost-me who, in most of the multiverse, doesn’t survive. I can’t be this winger with the broken heart. I force myself to suspend my sense of disbelief and imagine it’s me, if only in a movie.

My death is sudden. I’m timing this. A player on the other team, No. 12 in pink, skates to me. He’s checking my carotid pulse 25 seconds after my collapse. I watch this over and over.

After a few minutes without oxygen, your brain is likely permanently damaged. After 10 minutes or so, you don’t come back. The fire department paramedics get to me nine minutes after I hit the ice.No. 12 does CPR. On screen, the motions look smooth, fluid. He pushes down and lets up on my chest over and over, rapidly, pivoting on his knees, skates lifting off the ice each time he compresses my rubbery sternum. A man in street clothes runs across the ice and helps with my resuscitation. I watch them place the winger on to a gurney and cart it toward the rink’s exit. I see clearly for the first time a face, covered from the bridge of its nose to its chin by a bag valve mask forcing the face to breathe. The body is still, the eyes closed; the face unmistakably is mine. I’m dead. I vanish through the boards into nothing.

Two weeks after my cardiac arrest, I played hockey again, in the makeup for the game cancelled because of my apparent death. A few players were concerned. No worries, I said. My doctor was fine with it—I might feel some pain in my ribs from the CPR, if anything. I also carried a bottle of nitroglycerin with me everywhere. A nurse told me to so that I’d have a pill to stick under my tongue if I felt as though I was having a heart attack. I still had no idea what a heart attack felt like, but I kept the nitro with me.

Derek Broetje, the second man in the movie and a former EMT, came to talk to me. “I hope they told you how rare it is for someone to survive what you did. You’re a unicorn,” he said. “We brought you back both times. You were purple. You were gone. I’m really surprised to see you.” I tried, awkwardly, to thank him.

Playing hockey was the only sense of community I felt those days. I don’t have close friends and find it hard to make new ones. The games reawakened the joy I felt as a kid playing on ponds and rinks in obscure towns in New England and upstate New York. I wouldn’t let a widow-maker get in the way of a game.

I didn’t feel any fear, perhaps because my memory was wiped. I chose to think it was because I was a hockey player. I went down wearing No. 37, like Patrice Bergeron, the toughest player ever. Warming up, I was careful to skate over the exact spot where I’d seen myself collapse. In a 5-1 win, I scored once, on a wrister from the high slot, using No. 12 as a screen. 

After the game, I introduced myself to No. 12: Steve Fisher, a paramedic for 30 years with Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue and the other man in the video. I was at a loss for words. I wanted to say how grateful I was to the man who’d so quickly and masterfully gotten the oxygen flowing back to my brain. “Thanks for saving my life” was the best I could manage. I changed the conversation to my new favourite subject: the events surrounding my death.

“It’s not something that you want to remember at all,” he said. “CPR is brutal. We’re pressing on your chest in a really hard way. There’s no pussyfooting around. When you’re doing CPR, you’re squishing the heart between the sternum and the spine to the full extent to keep that blood flowing. That’s why you’re in the condition you’re in now, because we kept the nutrients and the oxygen flowing to your brain.”

He told me my brain was probably without oxygen for 15 or 20 seconds. I was unconscious the whole time, which is highly unusual, he said, adding: “I was surprised that our treatment was successful. Apparently, all the planets were lined up pretty well.”

Over time, I became wary of telling anyone what happened. A few people asked whether I saw a white light or some sign of grace or providence. No, I stared down the abyss (literally, I felt), heard a polka, saw myself die in a movie and was rescued by two hockey players, and I still felt the darkness, I said.

It wasn’t what they’d hoped to hear. People reacted strangely, hesitantly. Maybe the land of the living considered me damaged and wouldn’t let me back in. I continued to pick up the phone to call my dead mother, unable to break the freakish habit. I struggled to find work and survived by doing freelance writing and editing during the day and working in a computer parts factory at night. I didn’t tell anyone else about my cardiac arrest or my sojourn into oblivion.

I gathered stories of cardiac survivors and the people who brought them back. I didn’t find a case of anyone stone-cold gone nearly as long as I was who didn’t stone-cold die. I was nonplussed. I was unique, a medical oddity? Why me? I hope my pinball brain was worth saving.

My memories were wiped by luck, ketamine, fentanyl, midazolam and propofol. I had passed through the pain and terror that haunted other survivors and emerged with my brain and my wicked wrister intact. But what I’ve realized is that watching myself die was liberating, like watching the death of my stand-in, who was later reassembled as a new version of myself.

I’m still uneasy. But I’m here. I’ll watch the video I kept of my game. It’s my memento mori, a reminder of how unreal it is to be alive, all because of Derek Broetje and Steve Fisher. On the ice, I’m averaging 1.75 points a game this season.

The Slate Group (21 May 2023), copyright © 2023 by The Slate Group, LLC.