Steve Sassaman said he felt a bit of indigestion. And then he pitched forward so suddenly that his face hit the floor.

“They always say that’s when heart attacks happen, on Monday morning,” Althea Sassaman said. “He just fell like a tree, right on the tile floor. It cracked so hard it sounded like the floor cracked.”

Althea Sassaman called 911 for what looked like a head injury but quickly realized the real problem — her husband’s heart had stopped and he wasn’t breathing.

She administered CPR until two Susquehanna Twp. police officers arrived, and lucky for her husband, one already had four lifesaving medals to his credit.

After they arrived at the Sassamans’ Mountaindale home, Somma performed rescue breathing and Adams did chest compressions and used one of the automatic external defibrillators that Susquehanna Twp. police keep in their cars.

When AEDs detect the lack of a heartbeat, they jolt the heart back to life with an electric shock.

Adams, a former EMT who trains department personnel in AED use and CPR, had to use the device twice — and the second time did the job.

“The cardiologist said the compression [from CPR] sort of keeps things going, but it’s the defibrillator that’s lifesaving,” Steve Sassaman said.

Helping a heart attack victim start to breathe again is “a great feeling,” Adams said. In his previous saves in 2003 and 2005, he used AEDs to revive heart attack victims, performed rescue breathing and prevented a suicide, he said.

“It’s great to know that you’ve made a difference in somebody’s life, and they’re going to get a second chance with their family and get some time with their loved ones a little bit longer,” he said.

Steve Sassaman, who had no history of heart trouble, remembers nothing about his cardiac arrest. He received catheterization and got three stents in his heart. He wears a monitoring device that could defibrillate if it’s needed again.

Without his wife’s actions and the AED on hand, Sassaman said he might not have survived.

“With every minute that passes, your chance of survival decreases by 10 percent,” the Susquehanna Twp. resident said. “If AEDs are right there, we can save so many lives.”

Althea Sassaman said the township officers kept their cool while she “was very bent out of shape.” She told them, “You have no idea how much I appreciate what you did.”

Sassaman remembered his only previous encounter with police — getting pulled over when his car’s headlight was out.

“A lot of times with the common man or woman, that’s the only time you think of the police department. Until something personal like this happens …¤you realize how valuable they are, and all the skills they have to help people,” he said. “I looked at their emblems on their sleeves, and it says, ‘Protect and serve,’ and that’s it. Protect and serve.”

“She was shaking me and saying, ‘Daddy’s dead,’” Tucker said. “At first, I thought she was messing with me.”

Their mom, Jen Labadie, had gone upstairs to bed 30 minutes earlier. William Labadie — just call him Bill — was already in bed. But something was very wrong.

“I think he was mad about the cat, because he said something about it, and then his head flopped into the pillow face first,” Jen said of her husband. “Then he made the most horrible gurgling noise I’ve ever heard. I picked his head up, and he was gone. The doctor said he was dead before he hit the pillow.”

Bill, 39, had gone into ventricular fibrillation — essentially blood is not removed from the heart and it’s usually fatal.

Jen quickly dialed 911, and stayed on the phone while performing CPR before paramedics arrived. “My panic buttons were completely out of control,” she said.

Sullivan Fire Chief Neil A. Henry was one of the first responders on the scene.

“He essentially had no pulse,” Henry said. “It would come back and then go away again … I wasn’t expecting a good outcome.”

Jen could tell that time and hope were running out. “At one point, Al looked at me with the most pity anyone’s ever looked at me with,” she said.

After working on Bill for more than 30 minutes in the Labadies’ bedroom, paramedics put him in the ambulance for the trip to Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene.

“When I saw the ambulance pull out of the driveway with the lights going but no siren, and they weren’t going fast, I knew it was bad,” Jen said.

Tucker, his son, couldn’t believe what was happening. “It was like looking down on a dream from the top of a glass (ceiling),” he said.

All Jen could think of was that she didn’t want Bill to die outside the hospital, which would have prevented them from donating his organs.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of a world where his beautiful blue eyes weren’t around,” she said, fighting back tears.

Paramedics attempted to revive Bill with electrical shocks three times at the home and twice more en route to the hospital.

It seemed like a lost cause. And then it happened.

After being shocked for the fifth time, Bill suddenly regained consciousness, nearly an hour and 20 minutes after being considered medically dead.

“He came back with a vengeance,” Jen said. “He started ripping things out of him.”

Hospital staff immediately called for the rolling hospital unit, which transported Bill from Keene to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon.

But questions still lingered over whether Bill suffered irreparable brain damage during the ordeal, Jen said. “We didn’t know if he’d ever be the same again,” she said. “He was hooked up to everything you could think of.”

Ten days later Bill returned home, his brain fully functional and his body on the mend. On Saturday he walked a little, watched some TV, sat on the outdoor deck and the family grilled shish kabobs.

“It’ll be six to eight weeks before he can be active, and he can’t drive for six months because of the defibrillator in his chest,” Jen said of Bill, who works as a bridge builder for Cold River Bridges.

Bill said doctors told him they can’t explain how he recovered after being considered clinically dead for nearly an hour and a half.

“They don’t know, they just say it’s a miracle that I’m here,” said Bill, who celebrated his 39th birthday June 30 while in the hospital. “She (Jen) did good, keeping me alive.”

“They don’t see people come back from this,” Jen said. “People don’t survive this.”

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the survival rate for ventricular fibrillations occurring outside of a hospital is between 2 and 25 percent.

“There’s no way to explain how he’s still here,” Jen said. “He’s the strongest, most determined human being I’ve ever met, which is why I married him.”

Bill’s longtime friend and coworker, James Hollar, spoke of his strong will. “He’s a fighter, and he never gives up,” Hollar said. “There’s not too many people who can come back from where he was … maybe nobody.”

Henry, who’s been a firefighter since 1974, said he’s never seen or heard of anything like it.

“Of all the calls like this I’ve been on, that’s the longest I’ve seen anybody go that came back,” he said. “It was remarkable, and it’s a good feeling.”

Jen Labadie, who suffers from insomnia, is amazed at how many things went right for her at just the right moment.

“If I hadn’t been ready to go to bed yet, I would’ve had no idea (that Bill had suffered an attack),” she said. “Or if I’d taken my (sleeping) medication a few minutes earlier, I would’ve been out.

“I do believe in a divine power,” she said. “But I don’t know why certain people get miracles and some don’t.”

Wayne Millen the Survivor & Family

Genetically, his odds weren’t good. His father died of a heart attack at age 66. His mother underwent heart bypass surgery when she was 66. His younger brother, after surviving two heart attacks in two years, died at age 53 of sudden cardiac arrest.

“My brother, Gary, and I were very athletic growing up and we never thought we’d have any problems,” said Millen, 60. “I realized, ‘There but for the grace of God … ‘ you know? That could happen to me.”

So Millen regularly went to the doctor. He submitted to all recommended medical tests and took medication that lowered his cholesterol to ideal levels. He worked to stay fit. And last year he bought an automated external defibrillator.

When Millen bought his, he thought he might be wasting his money — the device would be useless if he went into cardiac arrest while home alone or when he wasn’t home, or he might be fine and not go into cardiac arrest at all — but he looked at the AED as a little extra insurance.

Thinking other people might also be helped by it, Millen and his wife told neighbors they had the AED if anyone in the neighborhood ever needed it. They stashed the device in their upstairs bathroom.

It stayed untouched for a year and a half.

Last Sunday, that insurance paid off.

Millen’s 27-year-old son, who had just arrived for a weeklong family visit, used the AED to save his father’s life.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Alan Langburd, the cardiologist who treated Millen when he arrived at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. “And it’s (almost) Father’s Day.”

On that fateful day, Millen played a few quick games of basketball with his son, Jesse Millen-Johnson, who had just arrived from Utah for a weeklong vacation, and his son’s old college friends. They played for about a half-hour. Millen and his teammate won two out of three.

A forester for the U.S. Forest Service, Millen had said the week before how good he felt, how he was bounding up the steps at the forestry office. But after the basketball game, he felt tired and a little winded. That was easily explained: He hadn’t played basketball in years and he was playing now with guys half his age.

“Boy, I don’t have the energy that I used to have,” he told his wife when he went inside. “I probably shouldn’t be doing that.”

Millen grabbed a couple of baby aspirin. His neck and shoulders hurt, but he’d gotten hit in the neck during the game and he was pretty sure the pain was from that, not a heart attack. Still, the aspirin couldn’t hurt. More insurance, he thought.

He went upstairs to take a shower. He and his wife were going out.

A few minutes later, Johnson heard a thump.

She thought the computer chair in their second bedroom had fallen over. It had happened before.

“Wayne, are you OK?” she called from the other room. “Did the chair fall over?”

The only answer was the sound of labored breathing. She started running.

“I knew immediately,” she said.

Millen’s collapse almost exactly mirrored his younger brother’s.

A nurse at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, Johnson knew what to do in an emergency, but everything seemed to go wrong. She had trouble laying him flat for CPR because he was too heavy for her to move. She couldn’t get the phone to work — the family believes Millen accidentally pulled the cord out of the wall when he fell — which meant no dialing 911.

She went to the window and yelled to her son and his friends, “Emergency!”

In the seconds it took Millen-Johnson to race upstairs, his father stopped breathing. He had no pulse.

“I was like, ‘Is this the way it’s going to end?’” Millen-Johnson said. “We knew this was a possibility, but at the same time you never, ever think it would ever happen to someone you care about.”

Millen-Johnson couldn’t get reception on the cell phone he’d brought from Utah, so one of his friends called 911 on his phone. Johnson started chest compressions. She told her son to get the AED.

With shaking hands, he tore open the bag and placed the pads according to the directions. Although Millen and his wife had just gone over the AED instructions the week before — they’d happened to dust the device as they dusted the rest of the house preparing for company and Johnson took the opportunity to learn more about it — their son hadn’t encountered one since a wilderness leadership course in high school. But the directions were simple and the device spoke commands.

The AED told everyone to clear. The shock to Millen’s heart sent his body 6 inches off the ground, but it worked. He started breathing a little. The machine advised CPR while it analyzed Millen’s heart. Millen-Johnson took over the chest compressions. His mother had done them for a few minutes, but 61 years old and dealing with arthritis, she couldn’t keep it up.

“I would have done everything I could,” she said. “But Jesse’s strength was certainly good.”

A couple of minutes later, Millen stopped breathing again. The AED again told everyone to clear.

The second shock, like the first, got him breathing again.

The AED advised them to continue chest compressions. Millen-Johnson did for the next 10 minutes, fearing the heart under his hands could stop a third time and that any second his father could die again.

Millen had been right that no ambulance could get to his rural home quickly. It took paramedics about 15 minutes to reach Millen, long past the point he could have been revived if his family hadn’t used the AED.

He was on his way to the hospital, alive.

‘Every day now is a gift’

Most people who have heart attacks first notice one of several symptoms, including pain or heaviness in their chests. Millen was one of the five to 10 percent who went straight into cardiac arrest.

“His presenting symptom was sudden death,” said Alan Langburd, the cardiologist who treated Millen when he arrived at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

By the time he reached CMMC, Millen’s heart was back to a normal rhythm. At the hospital, Langburd put in a stent to open the artery and keep it open.

If Millen’s son hadn’t used the AED, Langburd said, “(Millen) probably would have died. And if he had survived, he probably would have had pretty significant neurologic impairment. Often, they just don’t wake up. Or if they do wake up, they’re mentally challenged.”

Millen had none of those problems.

Langburd has been practicing medicine for 27 years. He had never encountered someone who was saved with an AED at home.

“Jesse was a hero,” Langburd said. “(Millen) was alive and doing well by the time we got him. So he’s a hero. Truly a hero. He deserves accolades.”

“It’s extraordinary,” he added. “And it’s (almost) Father’s Day.”

Millen remembers nothing after going to his bedroom to get ready to take a shower. He woke up in the ICU. Doctors and nurses told him it was a miracle he was alive.

Medicated and disoriented, Millen was little confused at first, but at least one thing got through: When his family told him they’d used the AED, he smiled.

“So,” he said, “it worked.”

Millen spent a few days in the hospital. On Friday he was still sore from his son’s chest compressions, but he was able to move around the house. His wife and son stayed nearby. The trauma was still fresh.

“It’s pretty overwhelming,” Millen said. “I see them sometimes looking at me when I’m probably thinking the same thing: They came that close to going through a funeral this week.”

Instead, Millen-Johnson took an extra week off from work and will spend it with his parents.

“Every day now is a gift,” Millen-Johnson said.

They celebrated Millen-Johnson’s 28th birthday Saturday. And on Sunday, a holiday.

“It’ll be a very happy Father’s Day,” Millen said.

“I screamed out, ‘Daddy’s dying!’” she recalled, explaining that the exclamation was intended to get the attention of her 27-year-old son, Daniel, who was upstairs.

Ms. Crawford, 58, wasted no time, however.

A registered nurse at Southampton Hospital and former Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps member, she immediately started administering CPR—at first on the bed, but then, because the surface was too soft, she and her son moved the 6-foot-tall, 220-pound, Mr. Crawford, 67, to the floor. Her son had called 911.

Meanwhile, Daniel Crawford’s friend, Justin Dent, 27, who had been watching TV with the younger Mr. Crawford, ran outside to ensure that police found the right house, Ms. Crawford said.

When Southampton Town Police Officers Bartholomew Carey and Edward Henderson arrived, within minutes of the call, they found Ms. Crawford performing “quality CPR,” according to a police statement. They then took over the CPR and used an Automated External Defibrillator, AED, to help revive Mr. Crawford, a landscaper, who, according to his wife, had not had any previous heart problems.

“I want these two officers to get the recognition they deserve, to show that their training worked, because had they not come to my house with their defibrillator in the trunk of their car, my husband would be dead. It’s as simple as that,” Ms. Crawford said. “These two men, they’re my heroes.

“You’re dead within minutes of having a cardiac arrest,” continued Ms. Crawford, who actually teaches CPR to new parents at the hospital.

She also credited the Sag Harbor ambulance crew members who, along with the police, provided three “shocks” to her husband. They administered advanced life support and took him to Southampton Hospital. In the ambulance, he returned to consciousness to everyone’s delight, she said.

The couple were able to celebrate their wedding anniversary together on Sunday. Ms. Crawford said her husband joked that his incident got him out of having to get her a present, while she told him his present to her was surviving.

All Southampton Town Police officers are trained in CPR and defibrillator use, according to Police Chief William Wilson Jr.

“The two officers, as well as the Sag Harbor ambulance, just did a spectacular job, as did the family members that had initiated the CPR before their arrival,” he said. “I think it just goes to prove that early intervention and taking steps to initiate CPR saves lives. I’m very proud of the officers. I’m very happy for the family that the gentleman is still with us.”

As of Tuesday, Mr. Crawford was still at Stony Brook, where he had been transferred for further cardiac care.

“My husband’s plumbing is good, but his electricity is not,” his wife quipped. “We just want to continue on to a very happy ending.”

View First Aid Corps World Map of AED Locations in a larger map

Three days later Mauger woke up in a bed in Kennedy Hospital, recovering from a massive heart attack he suffered on July 26 in the Cherry Hill municipal courtroom. Without the help of several police officers who quickly rushed to his side, Mauger said he wouldn’t be alive.

“I was speaking to the prosecutor, and I came around the desk and showed him what the contractor had done incorrectly. When I walked around the desk I remember nothing. They said I just dropped and started convulsing. I remember blackness that was it. To me, I thought I was only out 10 minutes, but I was really in the intensive care unit of Kennedy for two-and-a-half days. I felt horribly for my wife,” Mauger said. “I remember waking up and my wife telling me that they were going to take me to Lourdes to do heart surgery.”

As his wife Mary of 28 years watched on and used her medical training as a nurse to assist where she could, the police officers administered CPR to Mauger after it was determined he no longer had a pulse. After several minutes of CPR an automated external defibrillator was used to bring a pulse back to his body.

After 45 minutes of stabilizing Mauger in the courtroom, he was deemed safe to transport to Kennedy Hospital. While transporting him to the hospital the first responders had to use the AED on Mauger again.

After nearly three days he was transported to Our Lady of Lourdes where a triple bypass was performed.

Without the help of the police officers and their training, Mary said Dan would not be alive today. The officers were fantastic, she said, travelling to Kennedy with her and Dan and helping in any way they possibly could.

“He was basically dead on the courtroom floor,” she said. “He didn’t regain consciousness until we got to the hospital and the police officers stayed with us at the hospital until he did. They were great.”

He finished strong at the race (11th out of 240 racers on the 50-mile course with 8,200 feet of climbing) and was headed back to his truck to clean up when a friend noticed flames “licking up uncomfortably close” to the awning of a nearby home.

They quickly discovered a flaming barbecue grill sitting on a wood porch attached to the house.

“Unbelievably, there was no one home and no hoses in the yard,” Parsons recalled in a first-person account he wrote about the incident, so he told his friend to run up the street where a firefighter with the Blodgett Volunteer Fire Department was operating a tender for racers to clean up their bikes.

Parsons said he grudgingly called 911, “knowing that we’d most likely get this taken care of before another engine showed up.

Parsons, who still was unwinding from the grueling race, thought everything was under control when his friend called him over again, this time to the fire truck.

Parsons realized the firefighter had collapsed and was in cardiac arrest.

When he found the man had no pulse, he put his paramedic skills into play and asked his friend to make a second 911 call, this time with news that a firefighter had coded.

Parsons “cranked away” on CPR to resuscitate the man while the dispatcher on the 911 line kept asking questions.

Within a couple of minutes an elderly woman arrived on scene with an automated external defibrillator and an airway kit. It was the firefighter’s wife, Parsons soon realized.

He successfully resuscitated the man, had him take some aspirin and made sure the firefighter had stable vitals before handing him off as the medics showed up.

The Blodgett firefighter underwent surgery that night. He called Parsons three days ago to thank him for his help, and informed him he’d had bypass surgery and now has a pacemaker and defibrillator.

On firefighters’ arrival, a woman whom Hicks identified as the owner’s wife and a nurse was already administering CPR to the victim, a retirement-aged gentleman.

“We took over CPR and then applied the AED,” Hicks said. “We shocked him two times. Then we did more CPR.”

“By the time EMS got to the scene and we loaded the man into the ambulance, he was talking and breathing,” Hicks said.

Hicks also gave full credit to the nurse on the scene. “Early CPR, early defibrillation, that’s the key to saving people,” he said.

A handful of good Samaritans who pulled him out of his car, laid him on the street and performed CPR as they waited for an ambulance.

“Myself and the fire department, we’re doing the job we’re trained to do,” said Deputy Rob Wilkinson, the first police officer or rescue worker to arrive at the scene.

“Those good Samaritans didn’t have to stop and help, and they did. He owes his life to ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

Robert Monson was lying on his back unconscious, eyes wide open but not breathing and without a heartbeat, when Wilkinson and his partner arrived at the scene.

“I knew it was a critical situation,” Wilkinson said

Two men were performing CPR. Wilkinson asked a third bystander to hold a flashlight and another to start setting up oxygen, and then the deputy used an automated external defibrillator shock to the man’s chest.

“The defibrillator analyzed his heart rhythm, advised a shock. It (defibrillator) prompted me to shock him so I pressed the button, shocked him and he suddenly began gasping for air and was restored to somewhat of a normal cardiac rhythm,” Wilkinson said.

Monson immediately gasped for air.

“You could hear the gasping, it was amazing,” Mason said.

An ambulance arrived, and he was loaded in and shocked a second time before being transported to United Hospital in St. Paul, where he remained in the intensive care unit Sunday night.

“They were so good, the response was wonderful,” said Barbara Monson, who said Sunday night she tried to perform CPR on her husband in the vehicle before having to run out and flag people down. “I just flagged them down. … We were lucky the movie was just letting out and another one was starting.”

Wilkinson said the good Samaritans were vital in extending the window of time for the driver’s survival.

“The credit really goes to them,” Wilkinson said. “What they did enabled me to do what I did to save him. It’s a textbook case of what should happen when someone has a cardiac emergency.”

“It’s great to know that people out there care,” Monson said.

“I feel very very lucky, we’ve been married for 55 years, we’ve had a very good marriage, best friends, get along great,” Monson said.

Mary Lundvall (centre) the Survivor

As if watching your mother go into cardiac arrest isn’t traumatic enough, this happened on Mother’s Day.

When she dialed 911, Shonna was so hysterical that dispatcher Charity Stewart had trouble understanding what she was saying.

Police Sgt. Joe Baird and officers Derek Weinhardt and Tim Vogt were first on scene. Before rushing inside, Vogt grabbed a defibrillator and medical bag from his trunk.

The officers quickly went to work. Weinhardt checked Lundvall’s pulse while Vogt hooked up the defibrillator.

Meanwhile, Baird took Shonna downstairs to try to calm her down.

When Officer Brian McColley showed up, he took Lundvall’s husband, Dennis, aside so the other officers could work. Dennis had been performing CPR when police arrived.

Vogt delivered a shock and within seconds Lundvall had a faint pulse. That’s all it took. The shock had revived her. Soon she was conscious and alert, and by the time an ambulance arrived, Lundvall was talking.

She was rushed to Campbell County Memorial Hospital and later flown by air ambulance to a hospital in Billings, Mont. Vogt stayed by her side right up until a Life Flight airplane whisked her away.

Afterward, Lundvall thanked Vogt, telling him he went “over and above the call of duty.”

In his 18 years in law enforcement, Baird never saw an unresponsive patient snap back as quickly as Lundvall did. When he heard her talking, he almost went into cardiac arrest himself, he joked.

“It was a miracle,” Baird said.

Today, Lundvall is healthy and grateful, especially for the officers who helped save her life.

“God was definitely with us,” Lundvall said.

Dan doesn’t remember much more than that.

“He was down at the end of the counter paying bills,” said Lori Horgan, wife of 28 years. “I said something and there was no response. I said something else and there was still no response. I looked up and there he was lying on the counter.

Lori said she thought he was being funny “because he had joked earlier about how the bills were going to kill him.”

She quickly realized Dan wasn’t kidding, though. After she labored to get him down onto the floor, she took his pulse and came up empty-handed. His heart had stopped beating.

Lori then called 9-1-1 and began giving him CPR as she waited for help to arrive.

She estimated it was no more than five minutes before Chaska Police Officer Brady Juell was at their door.

Juell used the AED ( automated external defibrillator )to give Dan a couple of jolts to restart his heart.

Not long after, an ambulance arrived to transport Dan to Ridgeview Medical Center in Waconia where he was stabilized before heading to Abbott Northwestern.

Instead of waking up two days after his cardiac arrest, it took Dan a week to come around.

Since August, his recovery has been speedy. A week after waking up, Dan was discharged to home to regain his strength. He was back full-time to his job as a computer technician just after Labor Day.

While the physical recovery has been challenging, wrapping his head around what happened to him has also been difficult for Dan. He has trouble holding back the tears when he thinks about what Lori and his family went through the week he was in a coma.

“It’s always there, in our minds,” said Lori.

Dan is also thankful for the quick response of the Chaska Police. “By golly, if I get pulled over by that man, I’m gonna get out and hug him,” he said.

“[Juell] was just doing his job, but he saved a life that day,” said Lori. “I’m thankful to be here,” said Dan. “I’m thankful for everything. I’m thankful to be able to go get a tree and just (pause) just to be here.”

Now, with their new lease on life, the Horgans are enjoying every day together. There are only two rules Lori has forced upon Dan.

“He can’t sit at that end of the counter and he’s not allowed to pay bills on Sunday,” she said.