Champaign man gets second chance on life after losing pulse for over 3 minutes

What started as a routine drop-off at the hospital for one Lyft driver became anything but. The driver himself needed to go inside as well, not knowing his heart would stop beating within the hour.

The ER doctor on staff that morning said that if Johnny Namoff had ignored his gut feeling to go inside, this story would've had a much different ending."God was the one directing them and directing me to be in the right spot at the right time," Namoff shared.

It's the only explanation for why he's still here today. Namoff drives for Lyft most mornings just to stay busy."The first ride that came up was a nurse that I was picking up from her home and taking her to Carle," Namoff shared.

He said that he had been having chest pains for a couple of days before this and had been pushing it off. However, the pressure in his chest turned into a gut feeling to follow the nurse inside the hospital.

"So, I parked my car and and walked in and the rest just took it's way," Namoff said.

"He was my first patient of the day, said Ryan Hurth, MD. "I saw him at like 7 a.m. He came in with chest pain. His initial EKG looked okay."

An hour passed by.

"I got a call from the nurse that he wasn't responsive," Hurth said. "I checked for a pulse, and he didn't have one. So, I immediately started CPR."

Namoff was dead, without a pulse for more than three minutes.

"I did see a white light, a bright light when I was down for the three-and-a-half minutes," Namoff shared, "My mom was talking to me."

For those three-and-a-half minutes, the Carle medical team worked to bring him back.

"He got a pulse back, and he woke up and said, 'What happened?'" Hurth recalled.

"The next thing I remember is waking up when they were working on me," Namoff said. "I felt like I was watching a medical movie, but I wasn't watching it, I was hearing it, and I was in it."

He had suffered a heart attack. One artery was 80% blocked, another 100% blocked.

When Hurth was asked how often someone comes back to life after coding for that long, he said it's pretty rare, even in a hospital.

"Cardiac arrest is not a great survival rate. It's less than 10%," he explained. "So to have somebody code and get back completely neurologically intact is a pretty good thing."

"They told me that if I was in the waiting room, waiting for even a couple of minutes and I had the heart attack there, I wouldn't have made it," Namoff said.

He believes he walked out of the hospital three days later with a second chance at life.

"I always live day to day anyway, but now I just look forward to my future to say like, 'What? Do you have plans for me now? Because you kept me here for a reason,'" Namoff shared. "And I'm excited about that. I'm excited about every day."

Namoff has spent much of his life serving his community. Now, the support is returning to him. He shared that he had so many texts, calls, well wishes, and visitors in the hospital.

He even got a visit from former Bears quarterback Jim McMahon, who was in town for a charity event they were working on together with Namoff's brother Mike.