A miraculous mix of skill and luck: Carlsbad doctor gives neighbor early Christmas gift

From the quick arrival of paramedics to the foresight of physicians, it was modern medicine that saved John Griffith’s life on Oct. 3. But, as Christmas arrives, those closest to the events that transpired that day, and to the months of recovery that have followed, see something deeper at work.

“I think we saw a miracle,” said Catie Griffith, John’s wife and partner in Griffith Young, the family law legal practice they built together.  “We saw God kind of perform this miracle … we got to witness something that we don’t get to see all the time.”

The details of that day must come from Catie, as John, 48, continues to have a nine-day gap in his memory that includes the event itself.

On that day, Griffith recalls, her husband awoke feeling unwell and decided to stay in bed. She picked up the schedule, delivering their three young children to school, heading to work, then picking them up and bringing them back to their south Carlsbad home mid-afternoon.

Dad made his first appearance of the day during snack time as the crew was getting ready to mobilize for flag football practice, his arrival in the kitchen causing an immediate reaction.

“John had come kind of walking into the kitchen, walking like a zombie, and couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, and the boys were laughing hysterically, just giggling, because they’re like, ‘daddy, why are you acting like a zombie? You’re being so silly,’” Griffith said.

It was not long before everyone determined that this was no act. Catie Griffith dialed 911 when she realized that her husband could not tell her what was wrong. She watched him stumble, hand over his heart, trying and failing to type out a message on a nearby computer, then to a glass sliding door which she opened for him, watching as he made his way to where the family keeps its sports equipment. He incongruously picked up an air pump, the kind used to inflate soccer balls and pool floats.

“He puts the air pump up to his mouth and starts pumping,” Griffith said. “I can only suspect that he’s trying to tell me that he can’t breathe, and then he drops it,” she said. “Then he puts it down, and he points, and he’s walking towards our next-door neighbor, Dr. Eads.”

Seeing that her husband might not make the short trip next door, she makes the run herself, still on the phone with 911 dispatchers, landing her adrenaline-fueled fists on her neighbor’s front door.

An emergency medicine specialist at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego, Dr. Andrew Eads is no stranger to sudden, loud outbursts. But the racket that erupted on his doorstep that day still echoes in his mind.

“It sounded like someone was trying to break in; it was that loud,” Eads recalled.

Peering through the peephole in his front door, he saw his neighbor, frightened and frantic.

“She was just able to muster the breath and say, ‘something’s wrong with John, please come and help,’” Eads said.

Running to the side yard between their homes, he saw his good friend and neighbor staggering.

“He was clearly not doing well, kind of blue in the face, struggling to breathe,” Eads said. “He had his fingers between his upper and lower teeth, trying to pry his airway open.”

Choking was his first guess, but the behavior did not seem quite right. The typical gasping and throat-clutching behavior of a person with a blocked airway was not present, making him suspect the symptoms were caused by insufficient blood supply, maybe a clot in the lungs or a clogged vessel in the heart.

As paramedics arrived, a seizure began. Eads ordered that a seizure-reducing medication be injected into his friend’s thigh and cradled his head after guiding him to the ground to prevent further injury from a fall on the concrete sidewalk. By the time automatic defibrillator pads could be placed on John Griffith’s chest, he had no pulse, making it impossible to shock his heart back into a regular rhythm.

But monitoring equipment could still detect some electrical activity in his heart muscle. Following standard procedure, paramedics started chest compressions to get blood moving again as they loaded him onto a gurney for a ride to Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas, the closest medical facility.

Jumping in the back of the ambulance with his neighbor, Eads made a snap decision. He knew the odds of surviving sudden cardiac arrest after losing one’s pulse are in the low single digits. But he is also intimately familiar with an enhanced treatment that can dramatically improve the odds of survival. Having worked alongside Dr. Zachary Shinar, also an ER doc at Sharp Memorial, he had participated in a new protocol, first started in 2010, that offers a significant lifeline to those who suffer cardiac arrest due to a severe disruption of their heartbeat called an arrhythmia.

This protocol uses a technology called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, most often called ECMO, to re-route a patient’s blood supply through a machine capable of stripping away carbon dioxide and infusing oxygen, pumping blood back into the body in a continuous loop that does not require a heartbeat.

While this technology was invented in the 1970s to help treat severe lung failure, medicine has gradually expanded its use. A UC San Diego team was among those nationwide that used ECMO extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic when patients suffered such severe lung inflammation that they could not breathe. ECMO allowed patients time for their lungs to recover, supporting vital organs with oxygenated blood even though their respiration was severely compromised. In 2010, Shinar and a small cadre of physicians nationwide began using ECMO for cardiac arrest in the theory that handing off circulation to a machine temporarily can give the heart muscle time to recover and regain a normal beating rhythm.

A key aspect of deciding whether a patient might benefit from being put on the ECMO protocol is whether or not their cardiac arrest was witnessed and whether they received immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The witness requirement is designed to make sure that candidates had the continuous benefit of CPR from the moment they experience a cardiac arrest, increasing the odds that their vital organs have a chance of recovery.

Because he witnessed the event himself and knew that CPR was underway immediately, Eads, who rode in the ambulance with his friend, said he had no hesitation making the call to skip Scripps Encinitas and instead head for the emergency department at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, which he knew had trained with Shinar at Sharp in implementing the ECMO protocol effectively for cardiac arrest patients. He decided to skip his home base, Sharp Memorial, because La Jolla was closer, saving valuable minutes, especially given the typical Friday rush-hour traffic.

“I’ve put people on ECMO and have gotten to see them go back to their families and back to their lives, Eads said. “It was like, we have got to do this for him right now. I just knew it was more important than anything. You know, it just felt like there was no way we’re not doing this. I’ll drive him there myself if I have to.”

It turned out to be the right call. With an electric pump keeping the blood supply flowing, Griffith’s heart muscle, generally in good shape due to regular exercise and a healthy diet, was given time to recover. While the arrest did cause severe kidney and liver damage, ECMO afforded a long enough runway for dialysis and other treatments that gradually brought those vital organs back into functional condition.

Three weeks to the day after being admitted to an intensive care room, Griffith was discharged home.

Getting his bearings has been disorienting.

“I had no recollection of what had happened,” he said. “I had people come in from out of town, college buddies, family fly in, and there are pictures of me with my eyes open, my thumbs up, and I have no recollection at all of them coming to the hospital to see me or anything.”

But he sees his way forward with clarity.

“I just see my life in a new light,” he said. “I look at my family with different eyes now; I appreciate the little things way more than I ever did before, and I feel like I’ve been given a second chance at life.

“I’m going to do a lot of things different moving forward, just slow things down a lot.”

While the bulk of this story follows the normal progression of life-saving treatment, there are a few things that make this couple, devout Catholics, see a deeper cause at work. What are the odds, they wonder, that Eads, their neighbor and good friend, just happened to be present when his very particular set of skills was needed most urgently? He was, they note, about 10 minutes from leaving home to pick up his daughter, Valentina, from preschool. Had the pounding on his front door happened just a little later in the afternoon, Eads would most likely have returned home to learn of a tragedy.

Was this a miracle? Eads could not say it wasn’t.

“The science of it, the training that goes into it, the development of the system, is all important, but it makes it no less miraculous, you know, because there are so many ways in which you could do everything right, and things still don’t work out, where not all of the people were there at exactly the right time for things to happen,” Eads said. “You know, those are all the little bits that I think do make it a miracle.

“You know, that fact that Dr. Shinar went down this road 14 years ago, you know, and people built this system that allows us to do this, you know, every one of those things was something that led to that moment. What else could you call it?”