Dan Caplis, Denver lawyer best known as a conservative talk-show host and Ches Thompson, a 48-year-old ob/gyn, hadn’t actually met while they and about five other dads were playing football with their kids on the sunny Thanksgiving afternoon.
Thompson suddenly lurched forward and fell on his face.
Dr. Scott Bainbridge, a spine specialist also playing in the game, rolled Thompson onto his back, checked his signs and started CPR in the muddy field.
Dan Caplis the Saviour
Caplis, meantime, bolted to his SUV. By the time he returned with his defibrillator, Thompson was flatlining.
“Stay calm. Follow these voice instructions. Make sure 911 is called now. Begin by exposing patient’s bare chest and torso,” began the recorded voice in the machine.
Caplis followed the cues, placed the pads on Thompson’s chest and stood back as the AED shocked him with power Caplis describes as “ferocious.”
“Waiting to see if he would react, those were the longest seconds of my life,” he says.
Before Caplis and Bainbridge attached the AED to Thompson, he wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse. According to Cherry Hills Village Police it took only one shock from the AED to resuscitate Dr. Thompson.
Thompson regained consciousness quickly and strongly. The father of two boys is expected to make a full recovery at Swedish Medical Center for treatment. .
“I was in the right place at the right time with the right people,” he said Monday.
“It would have felt so incredibly helpless to have been there without the machine,” adds Caplis, co-host of KHOW’s Caplis and Craig Silverman show. He’s had the defibrillator for a year and a half because of another of his jobs, as a little league baseball coach.
“You can know nothing about CPR or AEDs and they can still save somone. They’re that good,” he said.
Updates
Tradition in the Hereford clan holds that the family that hosts Thanksgiving dinner prepares the big bird.
Ches Thompson the Survivor
But when everyone convened Thursday afternoon, Ches Thompson brought the turkey along with him.
“It’s fair,” jokes John Hereford, Thompson’s brother-in-law. “He didn’t do crap last year.”
“I put the turkey in the oven,” Thompson counters. “I just didn’t turn it off.”
To be sure, Thompson a year ago was a little preoccupied. After starting the culinary preparations, the Englewood resident went out to play in the annual neighborhood Turkey Bowl football game.
The game ended when Thompson collapsed face-first onto the field, the victim of a heart attack. As Thompson says, when one considers the alternatives, being forced to break with tradition isn’t really so bad.
After all, he was around to return to this year’s game and be part of the Thanksgiving celebration. Then there’s the rest of the holiday season, and, just a couple of weeks after Christmas, his 50th birthday.
“You meet people who go, ‘Oh, I don’t have birthdays anymore.’ Or ‘Oh, I stopped having them when I was 40,’ ” Thompson says. “But to me, having birthdays is great. This is a good thing; I don’t care if I’m turning 50, 51 or 61.
“Being here for birthdays, for kids’ graduations, to see them get married, hopefully see them have children — those are all things you want to be around for.”
On Wednesday night there was a smaller gathering at Glenmoor Country Club, a little dinner to honor those mainly responsible for assisting Thompson during his predicament — “the savers,” he calls them.
That group includes Scott Bainbridge, a doctor who performed CPR on Thompson while another participant in the game, radio talk-show host and lawyer Dan Caplis, grabbed from his truck an automated external defibrillator, or AED, to jolt Thompson’s heart back to life.
Before last year’s contest, Thompson and Caplis hadn’t met. Now they’re bonded for life.
Caplis says returning to the game — renamed the Defib Bowl and played out on a big field behind the home of one of Thompson’s neighbors — “will be very surreal.”
“But,” he adds, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Fortunately, neither would Thompson, who finds himself wondering how one measures good fortune — and what one does when Fate smiles upon you with a second chance.
As he says, it’s not exactly a case of a devious Wall Street financier who has an epiphany and decides to mend his evil ways, giving all his money to charity and going to work in a soup kitchen.
Thompson, an ob-gyn at University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, has certainly been beneficial to scores of area families.
“I felt like I was already giving back,” he says.
Perhaps the change can be measured in smaller ways, he continues — stopping to talk instead of rushing off to clear the table and get back to work and the Xbox after dinner, or making sure that vacations indeed become the lasting memories that families wax poetically about.
“My outlook on life is definitely different; you try not to sweat the small stuff,” he says. “Every day is a gift. The kids leave the dirty dishes on the counter, and, before, you’re going, ‘Arrrgh, why do they do that stuff?’ Now, it’s ‘Who cares?’ There are bigger things to be concerned about.
“I don’t think about how serious it was; it was life and death, and that’s daunting stuff,” he says. “I realize how fortunate I was, that it was a miracle. But on a more constant basis, you realize where your priorities and values are in life. Obviously, you want to come out of this a better person. Hopefully, I have.”
John Hereford says that whenever he hears about someone’s good fortune, like buying a winning lottery ticket, he’s reminded of what happened last year.
“I just want to say, ‘Oh, yeah, you think you’re lucky? Look at this,’ ” he says. “The odds of this were so much higher, we were so much luckier.”
The only reason Caplis had the AED in his truck was because of his involvement in a lawsuit stemming from a Montana case two years earlier in which a high school football player collapsed and died during practice.
Caplis, who had been playing in the Turkey Bowl for the first time last year, had actually left and gone home.
His son Joe, then a sixth-grader, was having such a great time competing against the big guys that he insisted on staying. So Joe was supposed to get a ride home with someone else, but at the last moment, Caplis decided to return to get in a few final plays himself. He arrived back at the field just moments before the incident.
Similarly, Bainbridge had planned on leaving about 20 minutes earlier but stayed when he couldn’t drag his son off the field.
In the mad scramble that ensued after the heart attack, Thompson’s friends and family frantically called around, asking what doctor they should try to find to take care of him. The name that kept coming up was Roger Damle.
Coincidentally, when the ambulance carrying Thompson arrived at Swedish, Damle was the cardiologist on call.
In something of a deliciously ironic twist, those not at the hospital found themselves gravitating to the home of a family friend, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a frequent target of the conservative Caplis.
“The odds involved were unreal,” Hereford says with a laugh. “I just hope it hasn’t sucked all the good luck out of our family for the next six generations to come.”
