again by injecting epinephrine into his shin.
His odds of survival were just under
fifty-fifty now, but only time would tell if he’d be in the 8.6 percent of SCA survi- vors with good neurological function. After two days in an induced coma,
Wylie’s first thought after Where am I? and How did I get here? and What hap- pened? was How am I going to pay for this?
His neurologicals were functioning
fine, thank you very much. His voice hoarse from intubation, his handsome, craggy face covered in stub- ble, and cut and bruised from smacking into the track, he looked deeply into his wife’s eyes and croaked, “Health insur- ance?” “I had been watching what was go-
ing on, all these doctors coming and going and I was wondering how much it was going to cost. Kate takes care of paying the bills so I was asking if she’d paid the insurance premium that month,” he said, looking back and chuck- ling.
He went home from the hospital af-
ter a nine-day stay with a spanking new implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) ready to shock his heart back into rhythm if it ever loses the beat again. Often mistaken for a pacemaker,
Wylie’s ICD is more than that, able to both monitor his heart rate and admin- ister a shock to restore normal rhythm if necessary. Wylie got confirmation that the ICD
works as advertised from a teammate at the recent Twin Cities 10-Mile Run
during the Medtronic Twin Cities Mara- thon Weekend in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was one of more than two dozen Medtronic Foundation Global Heroes — people from all walks of life who have benefited from medical technology such as ICDs, insulin pumps and pacemakers. “One of my teammates described
how it felt to have her ICD work and that was amazing,” Wylie said. It was, in more ways than one, a
humbling experience, Wylie said. “I was on the same team as a semiprofession- al cyclist who had to give up his career and a runner who had stage four lung cancer. Next to them, I feel I have an easy diagnosis to live with.” Still, distance running proved to be a
challenge even for a very fit figure skat- er. “I’m not as gifted at running,” Wylie laughed. “It was a brisk morning, perfect for running and I was definitely thrilled to be back and doing an event, but I’m definitely in the middle of the bell curve.” Almost exactly average, in fact. Wy-
lie finished in 1:30.21 — 1,598th of the 3,216 men in the 10-mile and 173rd of 337 men age 50–54. Regardless, Wylie had come a long,
long way since leaving the hospital after his SCA. Although Wylie was back on the ice within a week of leaving the hospital, his full recovery took much, much longer. The insanely fast heart rate caused by SCA puts the same kind of stress on the heart as running a half dozen or so mar- athons with no break in between them. It takes a week or more to fully recover from just one marathon, so, well, you do
Erik Kopco, Paul Wylie and Billy Griggs shared their life-changing experience at the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon Weekend.
the math. But Wylie did not have the luxury of
a months-long convalescence. “As a skating coach, I’ve got no oth-
er way of making money,” he explained of his quick return to the rink. “I was up and walking around and doing squats while I was still in the hospital. I taught my learn-to-skate class from the side of the rink at first because my ribs were still very sore from [CPR].” Six weeks after his SCA, Wylie was
in Mexico, conducting a grueling five- hour-long seminar. “The first four to six weeks I was tired a lot,” he said. The first time I performed was five months later, at Harvard.” Wylie’s life had returned to some-
thing like normal on a family trip to Lake Placid, New York, three months after his SCA. “We had a great time. Being out- side and being active — biking, hiking and water skiing — is what made me feel normal again.” But it wasn’t until that September, at
“An Evening with Champions,” an annual benefit for children’s cancer research at Harvard that Wylie once again hosted in 2015, that he experienced an epiph- any, of sorts. From the moment he set foot on
Harvard’s campus as a high school sophomore, Wylie knew, with the same kind of passion he has for skating, that he simply had to study there one day. “Interacting with the really bright
undergrads at Eliot House was the big- gest hook for me,” he remembered. “The idea people have about Harvard is that the students are inaccessibly smart, but I found that I could have really in- teresting conversations with them. They are bright, diverse people from all over the world. I felt like I could go anywhere from there. I felt like I could fit in.” Although Wylie admits his years as
a Harvard undergrad added another, perhaps unnecessary, degree of diffi- culty to an already demanding skating career, it’s clear his regrets are few. And the night those two worlds be-
came one at “An Evening with Champi- ons” marked the biggest comeback of his life.
“When I got on the ice and began
skating, there was such a feeling of warmth and support when I performed,” he said. “Everyone from my skating world and from Harvard was there and there was such a sense of, I guess this sounds silly, but I guess love is the word I’m searching for. A sense you matter and ‘we would really miss you.’”
SKATING 31
PHOTO COURTESY OF VICK PHOTOGRAPHY
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
