Runner comes full circle after near-death event
Friends and rescuers celebrate finish of race that heart attack interrupted
Joanne Hatherly(jhatherly@tc.canwest.com), Times Colonist
Last weekend, runner Ken Pungente finished a race that he started one year ago: a 12-kilometre event at Cedar, near Nanaimo. In the February 2007 event, Pungente’s heart stopped and, as one of his rescuers put it, he dropped dead.
“I don’t remember any of it, no pain, nothing,” says Pungente, 65. What happened next has been described as a miracle. Three members of a hospital Code Blue cardiac resuscitation team were running not far behind Pungente that day. They were on him within minutes of his collapse, alerted by a nurse, Melanie Cunningham, who found Pungente lying pulseless in a ditch.
Leigh Walters, a respiratory therapist, described Pungente’s condition in one word: Dead. Nevertheless, she and Rachael Merrick, a hospital respiratory unit nurse, immediately started working on him. Moments later they were joined by another Code Blue team member, Dominica Sweet. For more than 25 minutes, with Walters working double-fisted compressions on Pungente’s chest, they kept blood and oxygen flowing to his body’s vital systems and his brain.
Other factors played in as well. When Pungente collapsed, he landed head-down in a ditch, which meant that when his heart stopped, his blood flowed to his lowest body part, his head.
Pungente subsequently underwent open-heart bypass surgery and started on the road to recovery. His story attracted media attention in stories that ran in Island papers, including the Times Colonist, and in this month’s Reader’s Digest. Finding himself the poster boy for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation was a little discomfiting for Pungente, even though he hopes more people will learn the technique.
He deals with it with his own brand of wit. The plumber who used to drive to his job sites in a flame-painted hearse changed his answering machine greeting to: “This is Ken, back from the dead, leave a message.” Whenever anybody asks him about the incident, he shrugs off any praise for his survival and his willingness to tell his personal story in the hope of helping others.
“All I had to do was die,” Pungente says. “It was everyone else, the girls, the doctors, the rehab people, they did all the work.”
With the help of people at the Royal Jubilee Hospital’s Cardiac Rehabilitation Exercise Program, Pungente was back on the race course seven months after his heart attack. In September 2007, he ran in the CIBC Run for the Cure breast cancer fundraiser. Walters and Merrick were with him.
Halfway through the race, they decided to pass him.
“It’s hard to let go of him,” Walters says. Pungente finished that race without incident, but the 12-kilometre Cedar race and its steep hills loomed ahead.
This time, Pungente told all four women to run their own races. “No following me,” Pungente said. He wanted closure, to return to a life lived normally, although with a cooled-down competitive edge.
When Merrick and Walters passed Pungente only 1.5 kilometres into the race, no one said anything.
“It totally normalized a situation, where it hasn’t been normal for a year,” Merrick says. “It was fantastic to see everything just as it was.” As Pungente neared the finish, a number of runners joined him to complete that unfinished leg. Wearing a T-shirt given to him by the four women that read “pulseless plumber” on the front, and “Drama in real life: Not dead last,” on the back, Pungente crossed the finish line under a spray of champagne from well-wishers in one hour, 11 minutes and 26 seconds.
Then Pungente, Walters, Merrick, Sweet and Cunningham walked back to the spot where he had lain only a year earlier.
Pungente struggles to describe his feelings as he looked down at the nondescript country roadside of naked blackberry bramble and tall grass. He planted a Sicilian garlic bulb that he brought back after buying a house in Sicily this year; he will divide his time between Sicily and his home west of Sooke.
Pungente hopes that by returning to running, he can encourage other cardiac survivors to live without fear.
“There’s help available to get you back into your life. Go out and get that help and it will give you confidence to stretch your boundaries, to get back to being normal again.”
