CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- John Ogburn doesn't remember a single thing about June 26.
He doesn't remember waking up that Monday morning, or helping prepare breakfast for his three young children, or kissing his wife, Sarabeth, goodbye, or any of the meetings he had with landscape design clients. He doesn't remember driving to the Panera Bread in the Cotswold Village shopping center. He doesn't remember going to his favorite booth in the back, where he regularly sat for hours doing work on his laptop.
He doesn't remember crumpling to the floor about quarter past 4 p.m., his heart gone completely, terrifyingly still.
He doesn't remember any of the many, many things that happened next. But in the month since, he has come to understand this: If a single one of those things "didn't happen correctly," he says, "it could have gone differently pretty quickly."
And Ogburn, who was 35 at the time, would be dead.
'IT WAS A BAD SITUATION'
April Bradley was just starting her shift that afternoon as a delivery driver for Panera Bread. She went to clock in after grabbing a drink cup for her brother, who headed to the dining room to fill it but quickly returned to tell her that someone was passed out in the back of the restaurant.
When they got to Ogburn, whom she immediately recognized as a regular, he was splayed out on the carpet and "his face was just ... dark purple," she says. "It was the scariest thing I've ever seen." She picked up the phone and dialed 911, at 4:17 p.m.
The response to the call came faster than anyone could have imagined.
Maybe a football field away, Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Officer Lawrence Guiler had just finished tending to a minor accident and was in his cruiser about to get back on the road.
"I was leaving that report ... and the call came out for a male in cardiac arrest at the Panera Bread," Guiler says. "I look up, and the Panera Bread is right there. So, immediately, I just told our dispatch, 'Hey, I'm right here, put me on the call,' and I went in to find him on the ground.
"It was a bad situation. It was really bad."
Guiler should know. Before joining the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department four years ago as an officer, he was an EMT in the Durham, N.C., area -- which made him an ideal person to be the first of the first responders.
Guiler couldn't find a pulse and established that Ogburn wasn't breathing, so he began CPR. He estimates that the amount of time that passed between him getting the call and him starting life-saving efforts was "probably around 20 to 30 seconds."
About 30 seconds after Guiler arrived on the scene, another CMPD officer rushed into the restaurant.
"Coincidentally, I was already dispatched to a second accident in the same parking lot in Cotswold, which generally doesn't happen very often -- the same time, the same parking lot," says Nikolina Bajic, a native of Croatia who ended up in Kosovo as a war refugee, immigrated to this country and has been a police officer in Charlotte since 2006.
So within roughly 30 seconds of April Bradley calling 911, Ogburn was receiving CPR from someone who'd had a whole lot more experience administering CPR than the average police officer, much less the average person, and within about a minute, another officer was there to help.
The officers agree it was a highly unusual situation -- that the local emergency medical services agency, Medic, or Charlotte Fire Department personnel almost always get there first and start CPR, and that police typically are there to secure the scene or direct traffic.
How unusual? In 11 years as a police officer, Bajic says, "I've never had to do this."
'HE'S NOT GONNA COME BACK'
The officers say a woman in the restaurant who identified herself as a nurse offered to assist, "and she definitely did," Guiler says. "She didn't do chest compressions, but she was helping me try and monitor his pulse, see if he was starting to respond." The officers never got her name.
A few minutes later, four Charlotte firefighters from Station 14's B Shift arrived, opened up Ogburn's airway and fitted him with an oxygen mask, says Medic spokesman Lester Oliva.
They also began taking turns with the officers performing CPR. Each person went at it for roughly two minutes at a time.
Firefighters also used a defibrillator to deliver a shock that they hoped might restart his heart.
It didn't.
Medic arrived at 4:26 p.m., records show, and life-saving efforts continued as paramedic Benjamin Shaw and EMT Brittany Harris expanded the CPR rotation to eight.
Medic shocked Ogburn with the defibrillator again. And again. And again. They gave him a shot of epinephrine, which aims to return the heart to a normal rhythm. Then another. Then another.
Nothing. No response. No pulse. No breathing. No sign of life. At this point, more than 20 minutes have gone by.
"Me and my brother were [watching] and we were like, 'There's no way that this guy is gonna live through this,'" Bradley says. "And I thought even if he did come back, he'd be brain dead."
Bajic admits they were not optimistic by the time they passed the half-hour mark.
"[We figured] he's not gonna come back, because -- that long to be without a pulse, generally it doesn't end well," she says.
But they kept on.
'WE DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN'
Around 4:30 p.m., while Ogburn was on the floor of the Panera Bread receiving CPR from eight first responders, his iPhone started ringing.
It was his wife, Sarabeth.
"I was trying to get in touch with him because our oldest son (5-year-old Huck) had his first loose tooth, so he wanted to FaceTime with him to show him," she says. "I called a couple of times, but he didn't answer. I assumed he was in a meeting."
A little over an hour later, she was heading with Huck, 4-year-old daughter Birdie and 2-year-old son Revel to her parents' house for dinner when Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center called. She was told Ogburn had gone into cardiac arrest and that she needed to get to the emergency room immediately.
"It was terrifying," she says. "When I got there, I was taken into a room with two police officers, ER doctors, nurses and clergy. Basically, they said: 'We don't know what's gonna happen.'"
She says someone informed her that he received CPR for 38 minutes; Medic reported it at less (33 minutes) and the officers estimate it at more (45), but in any event, it was a lot.
And although his pulse had finally been re-established on the scene, he was far from safe.
When Ogburn was taken to the ER, the first person to examine him was Dr. Amy McLaughlin, Novant Health emergency medicine physician.
"Medic tells us the story," McLaughlin says, "that he collapsed in the Panera, that first responders were less than a minute away and started CPR ... that they had a total of eight shocks and five rounds of epinephrine, which is quite a bit. It's a lot. And the total CPR time, which is a lot."
McLaughlin says Ogburn's pupils were responsive, which was a good sign, but his heart was still acting erratically, his blood pressure kept dropping, and they were having trouble keeping his oxygen levels up. So she put in an endotrachial tube to keep him oxygenated, gave him one medication to try to stabilize his heart and another to try to increase his blood pressure.
A quick consultation with the cardiology unit ruled out a heart attack, and the CT scan McLaughlin ordered revealed that he didn't have any blood clots.
Ogburn had no pre-existing heart conditions, there was no history of heart disease or heart problems in his family, he had a healthy diet, and he worked out at a kickboxing gym four to five days a week.
"The medical term is idiopathic," McLaughlin says, "which means we can't find a cause for it. The medical term for 'we don't know' is idiopathic. Just sounds better, I guess."
'I GOT GOOSEBUMPS ALL OVER'
Ogburn was transported to the intensive care unit, then put into a hypothermia protocol, which -- as McLaughlin explains -- lowers the patient's body temperature several degrees below normal, decreasing the metabolic demand of the body so that it can recover.
Essentially, the patient is medically paralyzed to keep his body from shivering, sedated into a coma, and given pain medicine. (It's believed this hypothermia protocol might help prevent or lessen brain damage caused by cardiac arrest.) Ogburn's body was warmed back up after two days -- on his 36th birthday, in fact -- and brought slowly out of sedation on Day 3.
"When he started to wake up from the coma," Sarabeth Ogburn says, "he squeezed my hand. I wasn't sure if I would ever have that again."
His first few conscious days were a bit hazy, but it was quickly clear his brain was not damaged, and by the time Officers Bajic and Guiler came to the hospital to visit him on the Fourth of July, he was able to get out of bed to hug them.
"It was very emotional," Bajic says. "I got goosebumps all over because when I saw him and his wife, and how happy they are, and we met his parents and they couldn't stop thanking us for saving their son's life ... that's when you realize, we did all this. ... All these people's lives were [affected] by what we did."
Just over a week after Bajic and Guiler found John Ogburn unresponsive, they stood with their arms around him in his hospital room, smiling for a camera.
'THIS IS WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO'
It is amazing. All of it.
McLaughlin says, "If this had happened when he was on his way to Panera, he probably wouldn't still be alive. Everything that could go right for him after this event did go right."
Astonishingly, the only after-effects appeared to be some short-term memory loss and an extremely sore chest -- from the more than 3,500 compressions Oliva says were administered.
Ogburn now has a defibrillator implanted just beneath the surface of the skin near his left collarbone, there to give him a kick if something like this should happen again. But Sarabeth Ogburn says, "They do not expect to see him again until it's time to change the battery in 10 years."
The couple would like to go visit the hospital staff again anyway, just to hug them and thank them. They want to thank the firefighters, the Medic personnel, the staff at Panera; they want to try to track down the mystery nurse; and most of all, they want the world to know how special the officers are.
"They'd be the first to say, you know, 'We're just doing our job' type of thing," Ogburn says. "But from everything I've heard, they were doing more than their job."
What do the officers have to say about that?
"We were just doing our job," Guiler says. "We were in the right place at the right time. We would do it for anybody."
But he and Bajic are clear on this: Knowing that they played a big part in saving Ogburn's life is one of the best feelings they've ever had on said job.
"Being a police officer's a very stressful job," Bajic says. "There are days that this job can be just like any other job, where you just feel like you don't want to do this anymore, and that it's too much. ... You become overwhelmed.
"I explained to John's wife, I was saying that we have our negative and positive charge, and when things like this happen, your positive goes way up and eliminates all this negativity that you had before. ... This is why we do what we do. This is why."
Family on 07/26/2017