GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Every day for the last month, 47-year-old Timothy Ruff has woken up with a deeper appreciation of life.
“The Monday when I woke up, it kind of all hit me that I had a new lease on life and I think every morning to not take that for granted,” Ruff reflected while standing outside the Emergency Department at Corewell Health Butterworth.
October 20 was a day he’d prepared for, so when he joined more than 4,000 other runners to lace up their shoes for the Grand Rapids Marathon, he felt ready to put the miles under his feet.
“The morning was actually just a beautiful morning, nice fall morning, and my girlfriend and I were going downtown to basically run in the half marathon. Got there, everything was great,” Ruff recalled.
Everything continued to go well until about 4.5 miles into the race.
“Crowds were loud and really cheering everybody on. It was great and then I basically turned to (my girlfriend) and I said, ‘I’m I feel something’ or I was getting her attention and that’s when I felt the numbness in my legs, and it went straight up into my head, and that’s when I collapsed,” Ruff said.
Ruff had suffered a massive heart attack, which led to cardiac arrest.
“After that it was my girlfriend basically on the ground, thinking that maybe I had passed out, realizing then that I was clearly just gone at the time, holding my head in her lap, just screaming to everybody around her for help,” he said.
An anesthesiologist and a cardiac nurse, who just so happened to be running about a minute behind Ruff, immediately jumped into action.
“(The nurse) fell to the ground and started giving me CPR immediately and the type of CPR a cardiac nurse knows exactly how to do,” Ruff said. “Runners, everybody in the area, just kind of looking at, throwing up prayers as they ran by me, wanting to know what was going on but the race officials got everybody out to the left so that way an ambulance could come in.”
Ruff said he was shocked twice by a defibrillator in the ambulance and remembers waking up and asking where his girlfriend was as she rode in the front seat of the ambulance. He arrived at Corewell Health Butterworth, where a team was waiting for him. He was rushed into emergency surgery to clear a 2.5-inch block in his main artery and had two stents put in.
“I woke up during the surgery at one point and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And the doctor just said, ‘Putting two stents in your heart. Everything’s fine.’ And then I remember going back out again and then waking up to my daughter coming up to my bed and both of us crying. It was just an unbelievable day,” Ruff said.
Only 10% of people who suffer cardiac arrest survive, according to Dr. Lindsey Rauch, co-medical director of Kent County EMS and an emergency physician at Corewell Health. She added that they can often come with no warning, as was the case for Ruff.
“Annual checkups and regular physician visits are always important, but unfortunately, that’s the trouble with cardiac arrest is that it can happen to any of us at any time and it can oftentimes be without warning,” Rauch told News 8, adding that 70% percent of cardiac arrests occur in the home.
“Those that are more likely to have a favorable outcome are generally those ones that were in public. So someone witnessed it, someone was comfortable with performing CPR and getting the help needed right away,” she explained.
There were approximately 350,000 cardiac arrests in the U.S. in 2023, and though there’s been a push for greater access to AEDs and knowing CPR, Rauch believes there is still so much more that can be done.
“Whether that’s employers offering CPR classes and certainly speaking to your employer about, do we have an AED here? Knowing where that is, these are really important things and that’s truly what’s going to make the difference if someone does suffer a sudden onset cardiac arrest,” Rauch explained.
Ruff believes that if it weren’t for the strangers who jumped in to help, he wouldn’t be here today.
“It was a miracle,” he said.
The nurse, Kelly, had stopped to use the bathroom not long before Ruff’s heart attack, which put her exactly where she needed to be when Ruff needed her. He also later learned that the anesthesiologist had been disappointed that he wasn’t further along in the group, but if he had been, he also wouldn’t have been there to jump in to help.
“A lot of those little key things to me are really the story along the entire story of me collapsing at the moment, but it was … it was just those key people being where they were at that exact time,” Ruff said. “This story that I want everybody to know is just go to the doctor, get a heart scan, learn CPR, how important it is that even if you’re in a restaurant and somebody collapses … if you have that life skill to save somebody’s life is paramount,” Ruff said.