Steve Vanderhelm, Council Bluff, IA – 53 at time of event (2005)
Steve is an avid bike rider. He rides all year round, but in winter the bike never leaves the house. Summer is the best time, when he and his brother-in-law, Ed, regularly ride more than 20 miles through the hills and dales of Pottawattamie County, on the border with Nebraska.
Neither of them is going to break Lance Armstrong’s record, though they are fit and committed. But, early one morning in September, Steve nearly didn’t make it back. It was his son’s birthday, and relatives were in town to celebrate. He remembers pumping up the tires and meeting up with Ed on the road. His cycle log shows they were three minutes into their ride. They were waiting for the green light, but Steve remembers nothing about it. What he does know is that he stopped the traffic that Saturday. And those he stopped saved his life.
Steve had suffered a cardiac arrest and fell off his bike, cracking the helmet, and startling the drivers. Luckily, Steve had blocked the intersection and stopped a certified medical assistant, a registered nurse, and a police department officer. They helped Ed give him CPR. Oh, and an Eagle Scout called 9-1-1. It was not his time, although they were disturbingly close to the entrance to Cedar Lawn Cemetery.
Several days later Steve come out of a coma to find his family by the bed, a tube down his throat and a blockage in his heart. He reached over to get pen and paper and wrote “Wassup?” The big smiles and obvious relief on their faces further confused Steve. He could not stop asking what had happened.
His wife had him transferred to the cardiac ward at Creighton Medical Center for diagnostic testing. It was there that they found a 100% blockage in one of his coronary arteries and realized that is what caused his collapse. (At first, it was assumed he had a rhythm problem.) It required two stent operations to restore the circulation to his heart, and several weeks of rehabilitation during which Steve yearned to get back on his bike.
Steve says he’s been “given a second chance to do things better,” and is still “searching for what that means…” Steve knows he has to lose those extra pounds, plus he has some prescriptions to keep the cholesterol and blood pressure under control. But now he appreciates things differently; his wife, his job; and realizes that “You want to grab onto that.”
Recuperating at home Steve kept having visions of mountains and streams, and couldn’t for the life of him identify where they could be. During the second catheterization he found them—on the ceiling in the cath-lab!
-Jeremy Whitehead