Pennsylvania man, whose daughter’s Damar Hamlin-inspired CPR revived him, reunites with ‘amazing’ docs

Living to describe his own “death.” Being revived by his own daughter’s nine minutes of CPR, inspired by perhaps the most famous-ever use of CPR, and then — still with daunting odds, being further rescued by his own emergency room colleagues.

Any one element of Ed Breech’s story would make for a compelling screenplay. All of them together make for a story that’s only believable because it’s real.

Ed Breech is an emergency room nurse at UPMC West Shore in Hampden Township, Cumberland County. He had worked a long shift Christmas Day when he went home, ate, went into cardiac arrest and ended up back in the ER as a patient.

That in its own right was a miracle, because long before he got there, he had no pulse. His daughter Ellie Breech, 20, who is many impressive things — including the goalie of the Pitt women’s soccer team that just had its best year ever — moved him from a couch to the floor, as she had been taught in her CPR training, which all Pitt student-athletes get.

Then she began what turned out to be nine minutes of CPR compressions — more than a thousand compressions, doctors later calculated — until an ambulance arrived. For perspective, trained hospital workers — who do this for a living — switch off between each other every two minutes.

“You did the work of five trained healthcare providers who do nothing but compressions,” Dr. Matt Zaccheo, the regional medical director of critical care medicine for UPMC’s central Pennsylvania division, told Ellie Thursday during the first reunion between the Breeches and the hospital workers who finished saving Ed.

That was after Ellie’s flawless CPR raised his chances of survival from about 10% to about 30%, according to Zaccheo — meaning he was still more likely than not to die.

Ed Breech was at UPMC West Shore. The most specialized equipment and people for what he needed were at UPMC Harrisburg.

But “he was too unstable to transfer from the West Shore ICU, and we needed to mobilize our team,” Zaccheo said.

They rushed what’s called an ECMO machine and people trained to use it to West Shore, finished stabilizing him — and still had to get him to Harrisburg in a sequence of events that itself would be worthy of its own story, except that there are so many other worthy stories within this story.

It all started with Ellie Breech’s CPR, and when she says leaving the page. Damar Hamlin is an inspiration, she doesn’t mean just in the same way his story of not only surviving — but fully recovering and returning to the NFL’s Buffalo Bills — inspired countless Americans.

She means: She had most recently renewed her CPR training in a program at Pitt — to certify all 400 of the university’s student-athletes — backed by Hamlin!

And when Ellie, who has considered pursuing a career in engineering, says she might go into healthcare instead, she’s not just saying that either. She means: She has already just secured a position, which she will begin this summer, at UPMC Shadyside in Pittsburgh.

She said her dad’s own career saving lives — and then his experience having his own life saved by his own colleagues — caused her to apply for the job.

“I just met so many amazing techs, nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, that I could see myself doing what they do. So I kind of want to be like them,” she said. “I want to help people. I want to help save lives.”

She has to specify “lives” — plural — because she has already saved a life.

Ed can now describe what almost no one alive can: What it’s like for someone whose heart has stopped and is unresponsive to begin regaining consciousness.

“I could hear everyone — my family and friends,” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool, that they’re all laughing and joking and taking this – really, my death — really well…. And I don’t know the point when I realized I was still alive.”

“‘Oh, I’m not dead,'” he recalled thinking. “And I kind of had that little ‘click,’ and it was pretty interesting.”

Forgive Ed Breech if he’s only rightfully amazed — but less astonished than everyone else — by what Ellie Breech did.

“It’s her,” Ed Breech said. “She’s ‘game on,’ man.”

“So I just went into a ‘game on’ kind of mode,” Ellie Breech said. “I’m extremely good under pressure. That’s why I’m a goalkeeper.”

One who — with the most important game ever on the line — made the save of her life.