Thursday, October 11, 2007

Now that's CPR!

An excerpt from a book (Icelanders, by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson and Unnur Jokulsdottir, Forlagio, ISBN 9979-53-469-9) given to me after my talk in Iceland in August. I have been slowly reading it and came upon this story about a man named Stefan Stefanson, who lives in a very isolated area called Fagridalur.

I had a heart attack the year before last. Since then I haven't been up to the mountains as much. You don't have the same stamina for walking. I'd experienced it before. I thought I was getting asthma or some such nuisance, felt as if I was suffocating, then it got better. But it came back later. I was on my way home ... and found a Norwegian family on the road who had a puncture and needed a spanner, so I gave them a hand. I felt a touch of it then but it passed. So I drove home. I had a second attack by the gate here. There wasn't any pain but I felt as though I was suffocating. I drove through anyway and shut the gate. Then drove up the hill here beside the stream. That's the last thing I remember and in fact I died there. But I drove on home. Drove into the tree here in the garden, was flung against the steering wheel and gave myself a heart massage, jolting myself back to life. I drove a hundred metres as dead as a doornail. So you could say I was unlawfully alive.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great story.

I think to be legally dead you have to be brain-dead, and he obviously wasn't if he had the sense to pull that off...

Anonymous said...

Is this man alive now?

Anonymous said...

Dunno.