It was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and Tom Major, a 78-year-old U.S Air Force retiree, was sitting out in back of his house, having a beer with his wife, Donna, his daughter, Nancy, and her husband, Mike O’Hara. Nancy and Mike are also next-door neighbors to Tom and Donna.
Tom Major the Survivor
Somebody made a joke and Nancy thought at first that her dad was rolling his eyes at the line. But then she saw that his eyes had rolled back in his head on their own.
As soon as Nancy shouted that Tom wasn’t breathing, Mike O’Hara told the others to call 911.
He got Major on the ground and started doing chest compressions.
Nancy reached the police, who sent an officer rushing to the house. All the others realize that seconds felt more like hours while Tom was on the ground, “turning purple,” as Mike saw it, but they say the first police car was there 2 to 3 minutes after they called.
The family credits Officer Rick Dill with using the defibrillator from his patrol car to restart Major’s heart.
“I was very angry when they told me I was dead,” Major says, smiling, “because I didn’t see any of that stuff … I didn’t see any bright lights” or religious visions or people from his past life or any of the things that survivors of near-death experiences famously report.
“I didn’t see anybody or anything,” he says.
He just has a hole in his memory, one he can joke about now, after a long month of getting better.
“When somebody is that purple, you can be pretty damn certain something isn’t working,” says Mike O’Hara, who admits to being “greatly surprised that (Major) is able to tell this story. I didn’t think it was going to have a good outcome at all. So many things could have gone wrong on so many levels, he was just extremely fortunate.”
And for that, Major and his family are grateful to lots of people and one machine, the defibrillator, available now to bring people back to life in many convenient locations.
