DALLAS — It was a late August Sunday morning.
Bob Richardson was sitting in the same pew he always sits in – back row, right side of the sanctuary.
He remembers the sermon ending and the offering plate starting its rounds.
But, he does not remember collapsing.
“My head just fell back, and I was out,” he said. That’s how his wife has described it for him.
He stopped breathing. He had no pulse.
Richardson suffered sudden cardiac arrest inside the Lovers Lane United Methodist Church sanctuary.
But that sacred place turned out to be the perfect place for a medical emergency.
“Of the 70 to 80 people who attended that Sunday, we had three doctors in the house,” Richardson said.
Dr. Gary Weinstein, a pulmonologist at Texas Health Presbyterian, was sitting just a few feet away with his wife and father-in-law – both also doctors.
“I heard a noise that caught my attention, and I looked to my right and saw this lady kind of hugging and holding her husband saying something like, ‘Don’t go, Bob.’”
Weinstein hurried over and checked for a pulse. He found none.
Richardson wasn’t breathing either, so Weinstein laid him across the pew and began CPR.
A member knew the church had an automated external defibrillator, or AED.
Weinstein put that on Richardson’s chest.
It gave him a shock.
“But he still didn’t have a pulse,” Weinstein said.
He continued with CPR until slow, irregular breaths returned. A weak pulse soon followed.
That’s when paramedics arrived and rushed Richardson to the same hospital where Weinstein happens to work.
“I’m sure that doing what I do for 30 years and seeing code blues frequently and responding to them made me very comfortable doing what I was doing,” Weinstein said. “But anybody can learn. Everybody can learn how to do bystander CPR.”
The sudden on-field collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin brought cardiac arrest to the forefront.
Hamlin, like Richardson, survived because medical personnel administered CPR and used an AED.
But Weinstein and Dr. Hassan Pervaiz, the Texas Health Presbyterian cardiologist who treated Richardson, said the public needs to know that neither requires a medical degree.
“Every minute that passes without CPR, the chance of survival decreases exponentially,” said Pervaiz.
Here is a link to help find CPR classes across North Texas.
Pervaiz explained that in cardiac arrest, a heartbeat suddenly stops.
A defibrillator can shock a heart to reverse the cardiac event.
“In this case it turned out that one of our doctors was there and he did a good job. But anyone could have used it,” he said.
Richardson remembers waking up in the Presbyterian ICU.
He walked out of the hospital five days later with a small internal defibrillator implanted in his chest.
Two months passed and he was at a convention in Washington, D.C., when he suffered another collapse.
The implanted defibrillator worked.
The experiences only strengthened a faith that was already strong.
It also reinforced a belief that living a life in service to others is a path to peace.
“My biggest plea to everybody is – make your amends with God,” Richardson said. “Like – now.”
He said one small change in him is that he’s now more specific in his prayers.
“You know, show me what to do. Because you obviously let me stay here not once, but twice!” he said.
Weinstein is not a member of Lovers Lane United Methodist Church.
He’s not even a member of the same faith. He is Jewish.
He has been attending services at Lovers Lane with his wife and father-in-law since his mother-in-law passed away earlier in 2022.
“If she was still alive, we wouldn’t have been there,” Weinstein said. “Seven days after this happened, I went back to church with my father-in-law and wife. There was Bob in the same seat with his wife. I went, wow – that’s amazing.”
Richardson said he feels healthy and strong.
And when he sits in the pew where his heart stopped, he feels gratitude and peace.
“For a variety of reasons, I look around and think, the lord was with me. He was in this church that day. He could have been somewhere else.”