Joseph Tiralosi has one heck of a body. OK, maybe the 56-year-old Brooklyn father isn’t quite runway ready, but the professional chauffeur has stunned the medical community – and even himself – for his miraculous recovery after his heart stopped beating for a gut-wrenching 45 minutes.
“I have never seen or heard of a patient suffering an arrest that long and actually leaving the hospital,” Suzanne Steinbaum of the American Heart Association told the New York Daily News. “This is an extraordinary case.”
Tirolosi’s drama began on Aug. 17 at, of all places, a Manhattan car wash. He began feeling strange and quickly attempted to drive himself to the hospital. But his health deteriorated fast and he was forced to pull over on the way because he felt so faint. A friendly colleague came to the rescue, but by the time he delivered him to the hospital Tiralosi had “collapsed, turned blue and lost his heartbeat,” Dr. Flavio Gaudio told the News.
The ER team shocked his heart eight times to no avail, and became increasingly pessimistic about his chances of recovery. Most people in cardiac arrest experience brain damage after their heart stops beating for just a few minutes and death after it stops for 10 minutes.
Even so, the doctors tried one last desperate effort: they gave him a solution to break up any clots in his blood vessels. Amazingly, his heart began to beat. Acting quickly, the emergency medical team cooled his body to help prevent brain damage and rushed him into surgery to remove a clot and place a stent in his artery. He was then placed in a medically-induced coma for three days as his family nervously waited to see if he would wake up – and how he would seem once he regained consciousness.
Incredibly, Tirolosi is alert, has regained much of his strength and has gotten the greenlight to leave the hospital. “I’m just so grateful – this hospital gave me my life back,” Tiralosi told the News. “However long it takes for me to get back 100 percent, I’m OK with it. Time’s on my side now.”
Time and a heart that can really take a licking and keep on ticking.
Photo courtesy of stock.xchng.
