‘I’ve got a pulse!’: Seconds from death of cardiac arrest, a patient makes miraculous recovery

ST. LOUIS (KMOV/Gray News) - Mere seconds from death, a St. Louis man who nearly died of cardiac arrest is now vowing to pay it forward two years later.

Tony Meneses is a first-generation Filipino American who has spent the majority of his adult life living in St. Louis and working in IT before retiring.

He and his spouse of nearly five years, Paula Howard, call south St. Louis City home, but they’ve made a habit of traveling the world together.

And when he isn’t traveling, you could probably find Meneses on a bike, taking part in rides and races across the area.

And it’s his healthy lifestyle that made his ordeal even more unexpected. While at a party in 2022, Meneses collapsed, eventually entering cardiac arrest.

“I felt fine, kind of walking around,” Meneses said. “Then suddenly, I felt fatigued. I was going for my chair, and next thing I know, I had collapsed.”

Meneses says he came seconds from death. He was rushed to a nearby emergency room where doctors administered CPR for more than an hour, trying to resuscitate him to no avail.

After several unsuccessful attempts to revive Meneses, doctors told his spouse she should say her final goodbyes. As she did, doctors began to unhook the various machines from Meneses, when something out of a movie happened.

“I touched his heart, and someone screamed, ‘I’ve got a pulse! I’ve got a pulse!’” Howard remembers. “Everyone rushed back in and started working on him again, and they were able to stabilize him. He came back.”

That fateful moment was just the start of Meneses’s two-year-long recovery. After being transferred to Barnes Jewish Hospital for treatment, he spent the next few weeks in a medically induced coma. Doctors and his family were still unsure if he would ever be himself again.

“They’d ask him, ‘Tony, you need to squeeze your wife’s hand,’ and there was nothing until the day he did,” Howard said.

They determined that Meneses had gone into cardiogenic shock, a rare heart condition that results in death around 90% of the time.

Dr. Joel Schilling, MD, PhD, was part of Meneses’ care team at BJC.

“Many individuals who have a blocked artery in the location that he did, which supplies a major part of the heart ... many of these patients never even make it to the hospital,” Schilling said. “Anything goes wrong in these steps, and he would have had irreversible damage to his brain.”

Meneses’ condition was brought on by ischemic cardiomyopathy, a more common form of heart disease that hinders the heart’s ability to pump enough blood through the body.

Doctors in St. Louis found Meneses a heart transplant at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. His family helped charter a private plane to ensure he could be transferred to Mayo safely.

After relearning how to walk, eat and drink, Meneses is now able to lead a normal life nearly two years after the day he collapsed. He can only liken his ordeal to something out of a Hollywood film, thankful to the swarms of doctors across all three hospitals for saving him.

“It’s like ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Meneses said. “They had teams lined up that would rotate through in the mornings, the evenings.”

Meneses says that the effort to save him is priceless, something he appreciates even more because several of his family members spent time working in the medical field.

It’s part of the reason that he chose to share this story now. He said he hopes that it inspires others to become doctors and nurses, to help others and save more lives. In the future, he hopes to speak to young people about the importance of doctors and maintaining a healthy heart.

Schilling says two common ways to promote heart health are exercising and eating healthy. But he adds that much like in Meneses’ case, severe symptoms can present themselves suddenly.

He says if you begin to feel several symptoms like chest pain, fatigue, nausea or extreme shortness of breath, you should get to a doctor’s office or, in a severe case, an emergency room as soon as possible.

Meneses and Howard plan to get back to their normal traveling habits while enjoying time with their siblings and children.

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