A.J. Caliendo – Pittsburgh, PA – 49 at the time of the event (June 2, 1999)
A.J. Caliendo’s two biggest complaints about his sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) episode are that he put in a lot of hard hours rehearsing his first ever community theater play only to be sidelined after one performance, and that he feels he was cheated out of that long tunnel with the bright light on the day when the world went black for about 26 hours.
The morning after that single performance as a crazy Italian book publisher in a local theater production of “Lightning From Heaven,” A.J. was talking on the phone to a potential donor at the offices of a fundraising company where he was working part time. He suddenly uttered an expletive, fell backwards onto the floor and, according to about 50 eye witnesses, turned an interesting shade of blue. When the fire department arrived only minutes later, it took three shocks with their automated external defibrillator (AED) to get his non-functioning heart beating again. When he awoke in the hospital the next day, a kindly nurse—who the groggy patient mistook for an angel—was holding his hand and smiling down at him. After several hours of repeatedly asking “What happened?” of every family member and friend who came to see him, A.J. finally got the message.
The cause of the arrest was determined to be congestive cardiomyopathy, a condition that causes the heart to become enlarged so that it does not pump blood to other parts of the body as efficiently. According to doctors, when A.J. entered the hospital his “ejection fraction (EF)”—the percentage of blood pumped from the heart through the body in one beat—was 15%, while a normal EF is between 55% and 65%. That prompted his cardiologist to recommend that he have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) attached to the heart so that, in the event of another disruption of heart rhythm, the organ would be automatically shocked back to normal.
With still more tests to be run and the desire of his physicians to monitor his heart a little while longer, A.J. spent a total of 10 days in the hospital, long enough to allow plenty of time to ponder what had happened or, in this case what didn’t happen.
Because of the non-appearance of the famous “tunnel of light” that many near-death survivors describe, A.J. began to question the stories of those who went before him and to wonder why he hadn’t shared their experience. Finally, his ex-wife came up with an interesting but distressing theory.
“That’s only for people who are going to heaven,” she reasoned.
- A.J. Caliendo