73-year-old Carl Benson and his wife were attending Sunday morning services at Black Rock Congregational Church when Benson collapsed, his heart stopped and he stopped breathing, church officials said.
“It started at the first hymn we were singing standing up,” Jeanette Benson recalled. “I saw commotion up at front, and I knew where he was sitting so I knew something was wrong.”
Other parishioners quickly carried him into another room just off the sanctuary and that’s where the miracle happened.
About a year ago, Black Rock bought an emergency defibrillator and, as luck would have it, a visiting physician Dr. Federico Vaca an emergency physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and a nurse were in the congregation when Benson became ill.
They used the defibrillator to administer a shock to Benson’s heart. It worked.
The ailing parishioner coughed and then began to breathe on his own before emergency crews showed up and rushed him to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery.
“They couldn’t have been any quicker,” Jeanette Benson said of the response. After the defibrillator shock was administered, she heard someone say her husband’s color was returning. “I heard him start coughing. The nurses reassured me that’s a good sign.”
“It’s a miracle,” Jeanette Benson said emphatically Tuesday as she recounted the whirl of events that, in reality, took no more than 10 minutes.
He is now recuperating.
To Jeanette Benson, acutely conscious that such an emergency could have befallen her husband as he drove on the Merritt Parkway and with no immediate assistance available, it is all a sign that the Lord was looking out for him.
“His hand was in it all the way,” she said.
