You know WPXI anchor Susan Koeppen is a cardiac arrest survivor. Now, she's a cardiac arrest heroine.

You know WPXI anchor Susan Koeppen is a cardiac arrest survivor. Now, she's a cardiac arrest heroine.

Susan Koeppen sat at a red light on Penn Avenue in Point Breeze on July 13 believing it was just an ordinary day. Or, as ordinary as she ever lets any day be.

After suffering a sudden cardiac arrest while running with friends in November 2011 and being revived by two medical students who happened to be nearby, she’s a self-proclaimed “Let’s not waste any moment of any day” type of person.

By 11:15 on July 13, she’d already seen her three kids off to summer activities and played an hour and a half of tennis with friends. That’s before her afternoon agenda: preparing dinner for her family, getting TV-ready and heading to work at WPXI where she anchors the 4 p.m. news.

But her plans hit a snag. She borrowed a hat from a friend that day and forgot to give it back. With her “nothing is guaranteed” attitude, she turned around, went back to the tennis center, returned the hat and again set off for home, landing her at that intersection about 10 minutes later than she would have been there.

Her turn signal ticked away as she waited to make a left onto South Dallas Avenue when a car heading the opposite direction on Penn Avenue was swerving out of control, one way, then the other through the intersection. Koeppen thought the male driver, whom she could tell was older than her, must be confused. But when his car hopped the curb and crashed into a fence, she could see the man was slumped in his seat, unconscious.

As Koeppen raced across two lanes of Penn Avenue traffic to reach him, she noticed him rhythmically gasping for air, known as “agonal breathing.”

Koeppen knows that term and its significance as a “telltale sign of cardiac arrest” because she’s told she breathed similarly before bystanders initiated CPR and saved her life nearly 11 years ago. Since then, she’s maintained her CPR certification, spoken to groups of medical students, been the spokeswoman for the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation and works closely with the American Heart Association.

But on that morning, she went from well-known survivor to “ordinary” heroine, as not a single bystander or first responder knew her as anyone other than “the woman who gave CPR.”

‘She saved his life twice’

Koeppen popped the man’s seat belt, and felt grateful for her above-average height, nearly 5-foot-9-inches, as she had the leverage (and adrenaline) to lift him out of the car. But she also felt the presence of someone behind her, whom she asked to grab his legs.

Koeppen then looked at the helper — Dustin Kovalcik, a driver for Don’s Appliances — and asked him to call 911. He already had, and dispatchers were ready to help.

Koeppen started CPR as a few other bystanders — one of whom identified herself as a retired nurse — assisted by checking for breathing and a pulse after every five rounds of Koeppen’s compressions, which she applied from a standing position for better leverage given the terrain.

Kovalcik directed the rushing Penn Avenue traffic around the group. That is until he heard Koeppen scream, “The car is moving!”

She’d asked one of the bystanders to look at the man’s car registration so she could learn his name, but that motion caused the car to roll because, in the commotion, it was never shifted into park.

Koeppen moved the lifeless man, singlehandedly this time, out of the car’s path, just before it struck the back of her leg and then pinned the outside of her foot. She yelled for help. Bystanders rolled the car off her foot, and Kovalcik jumped into the car, cut the wheel away from the lifeless man and threw the shifter into park.

Those events took place in just five to seven minutes, the time until City of Pittsburgh first responders arrived.

“It happened so fast,” Kovalcik recalled, “but it was in slow motion at the same time.”

Full-circle

Koeppen and Kovalcik recall first responders working on the man for some time. After he was moved into the ambulance, they were approached by Dr. Nicholas George, that day’s UPMC emergency medical services physician, tasked with responding to every cardiac arrest and other emergencies with City of Pittsburgh EMS staff.

According to Dr. George, 350,000 sudden cardiac arrests happen outside of the hospital each year, and each minute without action decreases the person’s survival by about 10%

“With emergency medical responders, we can only get on scene so quickly, but people who are already there and at the scene like Susan was, they’re the ones who can make the most immediate difference,” he said.

And he wanted to give credit where it was due.

“I want you both to know you saved a life today,” he said to Koeppen and Kovalcik. But he noticed her shrugging off credit.

Like everyone else at the scene, he didn’t recognize Koeppen, which means he didn’t know her backstory: Raised by a physician-father, married to a physician and a daring reporter herself, she lives in a world where the norm is to jump in rather than run away.

So, he kept talking. “No seriously, you should be really proud of yourself. You made a difference in someone’s life today” and increased his survival by about 50%, if the data are correct.

That’s when Koeppen offered her story of cardiac arrest survival: “Of course I’d do something because that’s what someone did for me.”

‘What are the chances?’

Several days after the accident, when Koeppen reached out to Kovalcik’s employer to thank him and offer an update on the man — named Mark Symms, 64 — she found out something even more incredible: Kovalcik, too, is a cardiac arrest survivor.

“At that point, I just got chills,” she said. “What are the chances of two strangers, both cardiac arrest survivors, stopping to help a guy in cardiac arrest, and he survives? We all beat the odds.”

Koeppen knew this story was something special, so she pursued it for WPXI, a package that aired on Sept. 26.

When she asked Kovalcik to contribute to it, he dug into the details of his own incident as he never had.

He knew he fought necrotizing pneumonia — a kind that actually kills lung tissue — in 2013, that he was in a coma for 47 days, and that five days into his hospital stay he went into cardiac arrest.

But to help Koeppen tell their group’s story, he found pictures of that time he’d never seen and a Facebook prayer chain in his honor, which contained detailed updates on his progress, as written by his mother, which he said was “a lot to take in.”

Symms felt similarly when Koeppen met with him for two hours at his home, as she answered every one of his questions, knowing he had no recollection of that day.

“The whole story still has me scratching my head,” he told the Post-Gazette. “If I would have told myself that story, I wouldn’t have believed myself.”

Symms has a long history with high blood pressure but was regularly seen by doctors and followed his medication regimen. He also cut out some meats, loaded up on fruits and vegetables, avoided most sources of caffeine, and exercised regularly.

When he learned the basics of what happened to him in the hospital, we wondered “What did I do wrong?” But as a lifelong Christian, church-goer and Bible-reader, he credits “divine intervention” that day for joining him with two other cardiac arrest survivors and well-trained first responders, who afforded him more time to spend with his three sons, four grandchildren and three siblings.

“My prayer list has lengthened greatly,” he said. “I’ve been praying for Dustin, Susan, and the first responders and bystanders because these people saved my life. The most powerful thing I can do for them is pray.”

Living proof

If you caught Liz Kilmer anchoring in Koeppen’s place on the evening of July 13, now you know why.

Koeppen had her foot assessed that afternoon, and while it wasn’t broken, it did require a boot and some special care.

About three months later, it’s mostly back to normal. But Koeppen, even with her “That’s what you do, you jump in and help people” credo, is somewhat changed.

She’s asked to speak to medical students, in part, because she’s so rare, given 90% of cardiac arrests result in death when they occur outside of a hospital. But now, her story is richer than “just” survival.

She’s living proof that “anyone” pressing hard and fast on the center of a pulseless person’s chest can save a life. It just takes the guts to get involved.

“I was definitely put in the right place at the right time, especially since I wasn’t supposed to be in that intersection at that moment,” she said. “There’s part of me that thinks, yeah, I was really put there for a reason to witness this and to help Mark. But the other part of me thinks, I’m a mom, and I would want someone to save one of my babies.”