CHISAGO COUNTY, Minn. — On a Sunday in early October, Terry Steinmetz woke up overnight in his Chisago County home with severe chest pains.
He informed his wife, Lori, that he thought he was having a heart attack.
"That's when I started to panic," Terry said.
After Lori called 911 and spoke with dispatch, Lakes Region EMS critical care paramedic Kayla Hedlund and EMT Royce Hsiung responded to the house, followed by Patrol Sgt. Reggie Martin with the Chisago County Sheriff's Office. Together, they conversed with Terry and walked him into an ambulance with plans to take him to the M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center on the East Bank.
"Shortly after that," Terry said, "the lights went out."
Terry's heart stopped for five minutes on the ambulance stretcher as the three first responders got to work, leading to a sequence of events that Sgt. Martin's body camera caught in its entirety.
Deferring to the advanced training of Hedlund and Hsiung with Lakes Region EMS, Sgt. Martin immediately assisted with CPR before the medics began using a "LUCAS" device for more chest compressions.
It worked.
"Terry," Hedlund asked on the body camera video.
"What?" Terry responded.
"Your heart stopped," Hedlund said. "We had to do CPR on you for the last five minutes. You were having a heart attack. We're taking you to the 'U.'"
After a short hospital stay and weeks of recovery, Terry and Lori reached out to the first responders to see if they could thank them — formally — for saving his life.
"I didn't want it to just go by and think, 'That's just their job.' They really went over and above," Lori said. "I didn't think — even for once — that they wouldn't save him."
On Monday evening, Terry and Lori gathered for a meet-and-greet with representatives from Lakes Region EMS and the Chisago County Sheriff's Office. Terry spoke for several minutes with Hedlund, Hsiung and Martin about their efforts to revive him.
"A really strange night," Terry said, "that I'm never going to forget. Right away, I was like... 'I need to thank these people that saved me. Because they really did!'"
Hedlund told Terry that it was a "joint effort."
"If any one of the parts of the system had fallen out... if we didn't have a cop to drive us, it would have been different. If we didn't have a great dispatching system that got us the address very quickly, if we were about lost on the way, it would have been different. If you, Lori, hadn't called 911 when you did, or waited 15 minutes, it would have been a different story," Hedlund said. "Everything lined up."
While Sgt. Martin has done CPR many times in his career, he described the situation with Terry Steinmetz as unique.
"We've done CPR on people who have lived, but typically when they gain consciousness, it's at the hospital. It's not something that happens in the back of an ambulance," Sgt. Martin said. "Definitely credit to the medics. They're much higher trained and experienced than I am. It goes to prove that as soon as someone goes into cardiac arrest, good CPR really counts."
Terry now takes medicine twice a day and has been forced to adjust his diet, as he continues to recover from his cardiac arrest that occurred on Oct. 9.
But he's feeling especially grateful heading into the holidays this year.
"I definitely consider myself lucky. No doubt about that," Terry said. "It's really hard to wrap your mind around the fact that life is fragile and can end in an instant. Every day I'm happy to be here. Happy for these people, as well-trained as they are, and that they saved me. They did. They brought me back."
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