A Lifesaving Hat Trick —

He Sees Dead People, And Brings Them Back

By John Voket

He may be the last person you want to see on Danbury Hospital’s graveyard shift, but get him out in the daytime and Newtown physician William “Bill” Begg turns into a guardian angel for those stricken with potentially fatal cardiac emergencies. In the past ten weeks, Dr Begg has resuscitated three individuals from full cardiac arrest. All recovered and are doing just fine.

The emergency room professional is astonished about those statistically unlikely outcomes himself, considering only five percent of all ER visitors who are treated in the field in full cardiac arrest survive to leave the hospital. And during his career, Dr Begg’s track record extends to another victim he saved on the evening he first met his wife.

Only a fifth victim, who was unattended for more than ten minutes before Dr Begg arrived on the scene during a golf tournament more than a decade ago, succumbed to his illness. And while the four survivors and their loved ones may chalk Dr Begg’s presence up to some level of divine intervention, the youthful physician shrugs it off, attributing each incident to the coincidence of being in the right place at the right time.

Take for instance the incident at last weekend’s Ridgefield Half Marathon.

“I was hitting the four-mile mark and this guy about 100 yards in front of me just collapses,” Dr Begg recalled. “I mean he went down hard and was in full arrest lying there in the gutter.”

As a team of Trumbull EMS technicians worked through the busy crowd, Dr Begg worked furiously applying mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions for nearly ten minutes. Then, he said, emergency crew volunteers descended, applying three shocks to the victim from a defibrillator while Dr Begg inserted a respirator tube.

“It’s ironic that as the ER attending, I would be the medical supervisor on the call if the EMTs were calling into me at the hospital from the field. But the EMTs are always in charge on the scene, so we all just worked as a team,” Dr Begg said.

On Tuesday, Dr Begg visited with the patient who was chatty and preparing to have an internal defibrillator surgically implanted to monitor and correct any future cardiac irregularities.

“I guess it was fortunate to be in that place, at that moment to be able to start CPR so fast,” Dr Begg said. “Folks who do CPR in the field know that less than five percent of those victims will ever walk out of the hospital.”

The second incident, ironically, occurred at the recent wedding of Dr Begg’s mother September 28.

“It was bizarre. One minute the person was fine, enjoying the reception and the next minute [the person] was on the floor,” he said. Fortunately, the victim came around within a few minutes and after being assessed in the hospital, was diagnosed with a complete arterial blockage, Dr Begg said.

“It required the installation of a pacemaker,” he added. “Today that person is recovering at home.”

On July 20, Dr Begg, who is a runner and triathlete, was attending the Trumbull Sunset Run and had actually completed the race. But instead of hanging at the finish line waiting for his two children who were also running, he decided to head back down the course to meet them.

“I saw my son a few minutes later and he said, ‘Dad, there’s a man over there who fell down.’ So I went to take a look and this guy had no pulse and was not breathing,” Dr Begg said. The 50-year-old man was Trumbull Alderman Marty Shapiro who was stricken at the race’s second-mile mark.

“This was a similar case where I did mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions until the EMS crew arrived. We shocked him three times and got a pulse and blood pressure back,” Dr Begg said. That victim went straight to surgery for an emergency angioplasty.

“He walked out of the hospital a week later,” the physician said.

This recent life saving hat trick was preceded by an incident in 1990 where he successfully resuscitated a heart attack victim at a Pennsylvania social gathering.

“It was the same night I met my wife,” he said.

Even as an emergency room physician who sees many of the worst situations during nightly graveyard shifts, Dr Begg admits that medical science today is more about being proactive and preventative, and not about rescuing people from the brink of death.

He acknowledges, however, that nobody ever really knows when they are going to drop, so he challenges people to take basic CPR courses generally offered at low or no cost by the Red Cross and local community ambulance organizations.

“The more people who know basic CPR, the more chances people will be saved because they were in a position to do what I did,” he said. And while the doctor said he is always impressed with the work veteran emergency technicians do in the field, he has seen in two of the three recent calls how well young volunteers adapt in the most dire situations.

“While I was working on the guy in Ridgefield, the first EMT on the scene was this 19-year-old girl. But man, did she know her stuff,” he said. “The situation was similar in Trumbull. You have this new generation of emergency volunteers out there who are just teenagers, but they know their protocols cold.”

While incidents at social gatherings may be unanticipated, Dr Begg has heard way too many tales of individuals who only occasionally exercise, who then decide to participate in races, marathons, and even activities as seemingly low-impact as golf tournaments.

“No matter what the activity, if you don’t already exercise and see your doctor regularly, I recommend people get a checkup before they do these things,” Dr Begg said. “I think in many cases that medical check could be an opportunity to avoid getting into the position of collapsing in the street, and possibly not surviving.”