The text below was copied from: http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/nemitz/050814nemitz.shtml
Sunday, August 14, 2005
COLUMN: Bill Nemitz
Copyright 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
He remembers none of it. One minute Jonas Smith was exercising in his basement, the next he was waking up in an intensive care bed at Maine Medical Center.
In between, he left this world and came back not once . . . not twice . . . but 15 times.
"They never gave up on me," Jonas, 74, said Thursday, with all the gratitude he could muster as he looked out his ninth floor window at Hadlock Field and the cars whizzing up and down Interstate 295. "And I wasn't ready to get in a box."
Call it a miracle, which at least one of his doctors does. Or call it a will to live so strong that he flat-out refused to let his faltering heart stop beating. The bottom line is that Jonas Smith, whose obituary was all but written two weeks ago today, picked up the phone and called the newspaper himself last week to deliver an altogether different message.
"It starts with the people who clean the rooms here and goes all the way up to the doctors," he said. "I have the proof how dedicated these people are to their profession."
And what might that proof be?
"I'm here," he said.
It happened with no warning. On the evening of July 31, Smith told his wife, Lorraine, that he was heading downstairs to ride the stationary bike in the basement of their home on Dennett Street in Portland. At 5 feet 4 inches and 150 pounds give or take, he's tried to keep in shape since he was diagnosed with angina and underwent an angioplasty 15 years ago.
"Usually, when I'm down there, Lorraine calls down every few minutes, 'Jonas, you all right?' And I call back, 'Yeah, yeah . . . I'm OK,' " he said.
But on this warm summer evening, Lorraine dozed off on the couch. And when she awoke and called down to Jonas, she heard only silence.
"She found me at the bottom of the stairs," he said. "I was gone . . . gone."
Lorraine screamed so loud that their visiting daughter and son-in-law, Ellen and Howard Forman, came running. So did the next door neighbors, who heard Lorraine through their open windows and could tell something was terribly wrong.
Medcu arrived. The EMT's immediately began giving Jonas CPR, loaded him onto a stretcher and made a beeline to the hospital. As the ambulance pulled away, his neighbors stood in the street, many of them praying.
It didn't look good. Upon arrival at the hospital, the monitors attached to Jonas were flat-lining. Still, every once in awhile, his heart would generate a spontaneous pulse on its own - not enough to sustain him, but enough to persuade the doctors and nurses to keep on working.
"We employed a lot of advanced medicine and technology," said Dr. John Southall, the attending emergency room physician. Assisted by resident Dr. Rebecca Bloch and a team of nurses and technicians, they kept up the CPR, the intravenous drugs, the paddles for close to two hours - although as time went on, nobody truly expected Jonas to pull through.
"At one point I went out and told the family, in not so many words, that things were not looking good," Southall said. "He was in critical condition and it was likely he would not survive the night."
But then the spontaneous pulse suddenly became more regular. The monitors started beeping. Something very unusual - beyond anything Southall had ever witnessed - was happening.
Jonas, essentially dead for almost two hours, came back to life. What's more, tests showed no damage to either his heart or brain despite prolonged periods without oxygen.
"To have a complete recovery with no neurological damage is truly a miracle," said Southall. "I think the explanation lies with Mr. Smith - I would have to say he's a fighter. And he wasn't ready to leave his friends and family."
Jonas wholeheartedly agrees.
He came to Portland almost a half-century ago after deciding that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life cleaning the ballast tanks of submarines at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Instead, he became a hairdresser.
For 40 years, he operated Jonas Hairstyling - first at the corner of Oak and Congress streets and later on Forest Avenue. It was a good living, enough for him and Lorraine to buy the house on Dennett Street and raise their two daughters.
He was also a drummer in a never-ending succession of jazz bands. Over the years, he's played the Portland and Purpoodock country clubs, the Eagles Club, the Elks, the American Legion posts and everywhere in between. Five years after he retired from styling hair, he still performs once a month at the Seaside Rehabilitation and Health Care Center on Baxter Boulevard and Ledgeview Assisted Living in Falmouth.
He does it to, shall we say, liven up both places.
"We were at Seaside not too long ago and there was one guy in a wheelchair on oxygen," Jonas said. "We start playing and all of a sudden he's pulling his oxygen tube out of his nose and getting up out of his wheelchair and dancing around."
The man's family, aghast, quickly shepherded him back to the safety of his wheelchair. But later, as the band was leaving, the man grabbed Jonas by the arm and thanked him for an escape, however fleeting, from the twilight of his life.
"He looked me in the eye and said, 'You know, I've been dying to get out of here for 11 years,' " Jonas said. "Then there's another guy in a wheelchair who has no legs at all. The minute we start playing, he lights up like a Christmas tree."
No wonder that as word of Jonas' flirtation with the hereafter spread among his former customers, musical fans and fellow worshippers at the Sharrey Tphiloh Synagogue (where, in addition to being a devout member, he's a licensed volunteer funeral attendant), the cards and flowers piled up in his hospital room to the point where they almost blocked his view of the Sea Dogs down on Hadlock Field. (Thursday evening, he looked through a nurse's binoculars to see his three grandsons - Joshua, Samuel and Benjamin - holding up a get-well banner from the crowded grandstands.)
Nor is it a surprise that Jonas, after going down to surgery early last week to have a defibrillator and pacemaker implanted in his chest, couldn't wait to go home. His ribs may still be sore from all the CPR, but . . . he'll live.
"I have so many, many things to do," he said.
By the mid-week, Jonas was pleading with every doctor and nurse who came through to spring him loose no later than Friday. By Friday morning, he was anxiously awaiting the result of his final blood test - his ticket home. By Friday afternoon, Lorraine was there with a fresh set of clothes and Jonas bade his favorite hospital a fond and forever grateful farewell.
Why the rush?
Jonas flashed his eternal smile.
"Saturday is the Sabbath," he said. "And I have to go pray."
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:
bnemitz@pressherald.com