Four days later, Chris woke up
The moment she saw him, Judy Cox knew her son was dead. It was an October morning in 2008, and she had just stepped out the door to run an errand when she found him lying faceup in the driveway, ghost white, covered in purple splotches. He wasn’t breathing, and when she couldn’t revive him, she ran screaming into the house where her husband, Wayne, was still asleep. “Chris is dead,” she cried. “Call 911!”
Wayne jumped out of bed and raced down to the driveway, where he knelt over his son’s limp frame and tried frantically to elicit a breath or a heartbeat. As he pumped Chris’s chest and scooped out the vomit that had collected in his mouth, Judy ran to the kitchen and steadied herself long enough to call for an ambulance.
Chris was 26. He had not been well. An A.T.V. accident the previous August left him with debilitating back pain that physical therapy did nothing to alleviate. His doctor had recently prescribed Oxycontin. His parents learned later that he had taken too much.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Chris’s heart had been still for at least 15 minutes. It took the paramedics another 15 to get it pumping again; even then, doctors had little hope he would survive. Brain cells begin dying off just five minutes after blood stops delivering oxygen. After 30 minutes, there is likely to be more dead tissue than living.
Nonetheless, the emergency-room staff members at the local hospital did their best. They hooked Chris up to a tangle of tubes and machines and injected him with drugs to stabilize his heart rate. Wayne and Judy watched helplessly from the hallway. After four hours, a doctor finally summoned them to a secluded corridor.
Chris was in a coma, the doctor said, and in all likelihood had suffered severe, irreversible brain damage. He was breathing only with the help of a ventilator and would probably have a series of heart attacks in the night.
“First they asked us to let them pull the plug,” Judy recalled one recent afternoon, as we sat in the living room of the Coxes’ house in a Memphis suburb. “Then they tried getting us to sign a do-not-resuscitate order.” Without one, the doctor explained, hospital staff would be forced to revive Chris each time he started slipping away, which could mean cracking his ribs and shocking him with electricity. Even if they managed to keep his body alive, what was left of his brain would surely die in the days ahead.
Wayne and Judy refused to sign. “This is not some dog we’re talking about putting down,” Wayne shouted. “This is our son.” Chris still lived with his parents. He was a good kid, a joker, but bashful, especially around girls. He liked playing basketball and fishing in the pond near his house. He was planning to take over the family repo business when Wayne retired in a few years. Before the A.T.V. accident, he’d never given them much trouble at all. He deserved every chance the hospital could give him.
The heart attacks never came. Four days later, Chris woke up.
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