A Heart Attack and a Miraculous Second Chance at Life

"Donna's work family saved her family."

There were no warning signs before Steve Pareja of Sartell collapsed on his bedroom floor. One moment, he was settling in for the evening after dinner with his wife, Donna. Next, he was fighting for his life. What he now knows is that a heart attack nearly took him from his family.

But thanks to Donna's quick thinking and her decades of experience working in the CentraCare Heart & Vascular Center's Catheterization Lab, Steve survived. Even more remarkable, the same care team that saved him included many of Donna's former colleagues.

It was March 28, 2024. Steve, a radiology director, and Donna, retired three months earlier, had just returned home. Steve mentioned he felt "off." Not in pain, but unsettled, a little nauseated. Thinking it was nothing serious, he decided to lie down.

But something wasn't right. He couldn't get comfortable, whether sitting or lying down. No chest pain. No arm pain. Donna checked his blood pressure. It was normal. Blood sugar? Normal. She stepped away briefly, and that's when she heard it — a loud thump from down the hall.

Steve was lying on the floor unresponsive. Donna called 911, put them on speakerphone and started feeling for a pulse. There was none.

"He had agonal breathing…he wasn't lying flat, and I couldn't get him straight," she recalled. "When I was doing CPR, I wasn't able to give him any breaths, so I could only hope that the chest compressions would be enough to save him."

Paramedics arrived within minutes, taking over CPR and rushing Steve to CentraCare - St. Cloud Hospital Emergency Trauma Center. But the journey was just beginning.

Steve was quickly prepped for a heart catheterization, an invasive procedure that allows health care providers to evaluate heart function, in the very cath lab where Donna had spent more than two decades of her career. The cardiologist on call that night was Bernard Erickson, MD, someone Donna knew well.

"I had his number, so I texted him," she said. "I told him, 'Just so you know, the patient you're coming in for is Steve.'"

Dr. Erickson later reflected on the personal impact of that night, "I worked with Donna for 25 years, and knew Steve on a personal level. We always do our best to care for all patients. When it's someone you know, it really hits home."

Donna had seen hundreds of cases during her career, but nothing could prepare her for seeing her own husband in this situation.

Dr. Erickson placed a couple of stents and inserted an intra-aortic balloon pump to help the heart pump more blood before moving Steve to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU). For a while, things looked promising. But then, his condition took a sharp turn.

By the next morning, Steve's heart had become weaker. He needed to be taken back to the cath lab where Cardiologist Wade Schmidt, MD, inserted an Impella heart pump, a device that allows the heart to rest and recover by temporarily assisting with the pumping function of the heart.

The next few days were very tenuous. Steve went into cardiogenic shock, developed sepsis and experienced kidney failure. A man known in the community not only as a health care leader but also as an ordained deacon for the Diocese of St. Cloud, Steve was given Last Rites twice.

"The doctors would come in and look at Steve's monitor, heart rate and (echocardiogram) results, and it was a whole team coming together to figure out how to best take care of Steve during this time," said Donna.

On Saturday night, CentraCare Cardiologist Thom Dahle, MD, was rounding when Donna asked for the unvarnished truth.

"He told me there was one more option," Donna said. "It was a last-resort kind of thing. He said they've had some success with it, but also some failures. He didn't want to give me false hope."

That night, Donna and their son went home and had a difficult conversation. How far should they go? What would Steve want?

Then came Easter morning.

"When I walked into the hospital, CentraCare Cardiologist Jamie Pelzel, MD, was there with a smile," Donna said. "He told me Steve had turned a corner overnight. He was getting better."

"I went into cardiac arrest and died on Holy Thursday," Steve later said. "And on Easter Sunday, they were confident I was going to survive."

Steve remembers none of it. "I had no history of heart disease. I thought I was supposed to be heading into a meeting the next morning with my boss' boss," he said. "I woke up eight days later thinking I'd been in a car accident."

It took time to fill in the blanks. As family, friends and his care team shared what had happened, Steve struggled to make sense of it all.

"I still can't process it," he said. "I still wonder why it worked out so well."

Today, Steve calls every day a gift. He's deeply grateful to the paramedics, physicians, nurses and support staff who brought him back. But the gratitude runs even deeper, knowing it was Donna's professional family who saved her personal one.

"These were people I've known socially…people Donna worked with nearly her entire career. Some of them she trained. To be able to say thank you to them? That means everything," said Steve.

For Dr. Erickson, caring for the heart goes beyond medicine. It's also about the community. "We have a fantastic team at the Heart Center that continues to be at the forefront of cardiac care…Living and working in a smaller community, it is inevitable that we will care for people we know."

The Parejas now speak openly about their journey. Steve admits he struggles sometimes with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over what happened, but physically, he feels great.

"In some ways, I feel better than I have in decades…we're all eating healthier, we're exercising more. We're enjoying our time together. We're enjoying the silent moments that we have together. There's just a lot of gratitude."