His ailing heart was in the right placeBy Josephine Marcotty, Star TribuneEarly in the evening last St. Patrick's Day, Jim Meis stood up from his chair, looked his longtime partner, Trudy Lohre, in the eye and said, "I'm going to die." "Oh no, you're not," she said, leaping for the phone to dial 911. Then he said it two more times - "I'm going to die" - and collapsed at her feet. Lohre threw down the phone and started pressing his chest until the ambulance arrived. Lohre was right. Meis, 60, didn't die that day. About an hour after he collapsed at his home in Monticello, he was landing on the helipad at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, pumped full of drugs and with a breathing tube down his throat. Meis' survival that harrowing night is the story of a community with a rare combination of medical assets: civilians trained in CPR, state-of-the art emergency care and cutting-edge cardiac medicine. |