North Liberty man survives heart attack, thanks to CPR, AED

Don Triggs of North Liberty had an eventful Saturday planned on July 13, 2024. He and his wife, Rochelle, would visit the Iowa City Farmers Market in the morning and play a round of golf before attending the North Liberty Blues and BBQ festival later in the day.

The heart attack that would keep Don in the hospital for 13 days was not on the day’s itinerary.

Rochelle said she remembered him saying, “I don’t want to be in denial about this. I think we need to go to the emergency room.”

The Triggs’ middle daughter, Kaelyn, a medical lab assistant at UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, was living with them at the time. She recommended they go to St. Luke’s, and the three Triggs loaded into their Kia Telluride.

Don was walking around and responsive before they began the drive, Rochelle said, so it didn’t feel like they were dealing with an emergency.

But when he suddenly lost consciousness in the car, she shifted into action. Rochelle instructed Kaelyn to keep Don’s airway open while she called 911, pulling over to the side of the road to begin administering CPR.

“After the fact, as I analyzed it, it was less than a half an hour between when he woke me up and when we were doing CPR on the side of the road,” Rochelle said.

Off Interstate 380, in front of the decorated tree just south of Highway 30, Rochelle and Kaelyn performed CPR on Don for 15 minutes.

“It felt like an eternity,” Rochelle said.

‘A miracle’

While they administered chest compressions, a law enforcement officer arrived with an AED. After Don received two shocks from the AED, they resumed compressions until an ambulance arrived 15 minutes later. By the time Don arrived at the emergency room, he’d had half an hour of CPR.

Combined with the additional CPR he received in the emergency room, Don probably spent around 40 minutes without a pulse, said Dr. Ryan Sundermann, medical director of the St. Luke’s emergency department.

“The fact this guy survived is a miracle,” said Sundermann, who was not involved in Triggs’ care but commented after reviewing hospital records. “Even if they get your heart started, if you go that long without oxygen to your brain, your brain just doesn't really recover well from it.”

After being cared for in the ER, Don was sent to the hospital’s catheterization lab where Dr. Ankur Vyas, an interventional cardiologist, installed a stent and an Impella heart pump in the blocked artery, resuming blood flow to Don’s heart. A piece of plaque in Don’s heart had broken off and lodged in an artery, which then became inflamed and blocked. As a result, his heart went into a life-threatening abnormal rhythm that was resolved by the stent and Impella device.

“A small minority of heart attacks lead to a life-threatening abnormal heart rhythm that prevents the heart from beating at all,” Vyas said. “So, for him, that was the major event that significantly increased his risk of not surviving.”

Don said he doesn’t remember much of the experience because he was unconscious during most of it. Rochelle, however, does. She called their pastor while Don was in the emergency room and gave her permission to share what was happening with the congregation at North Liberty United Methodist Church.

The doctors weren’t sure if Don was going to pull through. The first big milestone to predict his recovery would come 24 hours after the heart attack, which, coincidentally, fell between the church’s two worship services.

“We got to that first milestone, and I could feel prayers and just surrounded by care, both at the hospital and from all the prayers that I knew that were happening,” Rochelle said.

Stroke

Surviving that experience alone would’ve been an incredible feat. But Don’s story didn’t end with the heart attack.

Six days later, he experienced a stroke while still recovering in the hospital. Like his heart attack, the stroke was unexpected, but quick action saved his life.

The chances for a full recovery in a case like Don’s are quite small, Sundermann said.

“If he’s up and walking and talking and doing his normal activities and things like that, he's the poster child for excellent cardiac care and stroke care,” Sundermann said.

Team effort

The community continued to pull through for the Triggs family. Friends, coworkers, even members of their youngest son’s baseball team, pitched in to support them as Don spent the next week in the hospital and continued his recovery at home.

“I'm still amazed (by) the number of people that came forward,” Don said. “On the one-year anniversary last summer, we threw a little party here at our house, just to say thanks to everybody that had pitched in, whether it was bringing over a casserole or a DoorDash card.”

While Don was in the hospital, the family purchased shirts from the St. Luke’s gift shop that read, “Team Effort.” The Triggs understood Don’s survival depended on the teamwork between everyone from the ER staff to the catheterization lab workers to the ICU team. They brought in heart-shaped cookies in fall 2024 as Don was going to his final outpatient rehabilitation appointments to thank those in all the different departments.

“It took a team effort for everybody involved, and that’s even in my recovery,” Don said. “It’s a huge team, and they all work together seamlessly to provide the best care.”

Beyond his family and the St. Luke’s team, Triggs had the chance to meet another group involved in his recovery: the people who made the Impella device that helped his heart pump for three days. It was made by the medical device company Abiomed based in Danvers, Massachusetts, and Don was invited to a summit where he got to meet the Abiomed CEO and the person who manufactured the device that was briefly inside his body, helping keep him alive.

While everyone from his family to the teams of medical professionals who worked on him were highly trained and capable, some of Don’s survival still came down to luck.

High-quality CPR

One of the big takeaways from Don’s case is the importance of immediate, high-quality CPR, according to Vyas, the St. Luke’s cardiologist. Approximately 90% of people who have a heart attack outside of the hospital die, but immediate CPR triples their chance of survival, according to the Red Cross.

“Cardiac arrest is one of the highest-risk things you can treat,” Vyas said. “You never know when you may be called upon to help save somebody else's life, and it's a simple thing that most of us can do.”

Rochelle and Don were CPR-certified before graduating high school, but they learned it again when they lived in Belmond in north-central Iowa. Don wanted to be a first responder and take an EMT training, but it was short one person. Rochelle was finishing her master’s degree at the University of Iowa and was not eager to take on any more schooling, but Don coaxed her into signing up.

“I convinced her. I said, ‘It’ll be fun.’ We didn’t have any kids at that time. You know, this will be kind of an adventure,” Don said. “In a sense, I kind of saved my own life because I convinced my wife to become an EMT.”

The Triggs served as EMTs in Belmond for the two years they lived there. The training clearly stuck. When Don’s heart attack came, 30 years later, Rochelle knew what to do.

When Don went back to work full-time in early 2025, he led the staff during an all-employee meeting at Collins Aerospace in Coralville where he works in a quick bystander CPR training. On Thursday, he spoke at an AED giveaway for St. Luke’s heart saver grant program. The initial shocks Don got from the officer’s AED were another important factor in his survival.

Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids used to have an AED giveaway program that ended in 2021 after supplying more than 85 AEDs to local organizations. The St. Luke’s heart saver grant, sponsored by the St. Luke’s Health Care Foundation, gave out another 50 AEDs at Thursday’s event.

After everything he’s been through, Don isn’t taking anything for granted. He said he and others in the family catch themselves using the phrase, “I get to.”

“We use the phrase ‘we get to’ or I'll say ‘I get to,’ which means, I got another chance. I got another shot at life and so I get to do this or I get to talk to you about this or I get to go to work today,” Don said. “Nothing’s ever boring or dull or (filled) with dread because I get to.”