'I fell over dead; I was gone': Georgia man, 58, survives cardiac arrest

ROSWELL, Ga. - Brad and Michele Ramsay feel like they are still together. Brad is still here thanks to the fast response when the 58-year-old Roswell man suddenly collapsed at a church youth retreat on Nov. 4, 2023.

"It's great to say, 'Well, if this person was there, if that person was there...' but in reality, if they weren't all there, it wouldn't have turned out this way," Michele Ramsay says.

The Ramsays married 2 years ago, after Brad lost his first wife to cancer in 2021.

The couple, who are from Canada, were volunteering together in Cleveland that day.

"I was at Woodlands Christian Camp," Ramsay says. "We had a youth retreat for the weekend. I serve at North Point Community Church as a leader for a small group of grade nine boys, and the activity for the Saturday was basketball, 3-on-3.

He was there, he says, to make sure the kids were having fun.

"Make sure that they were hitting the shots. They were getting the balls. I was doing what any 58-year-old man would do, which is try not to have a heart attack, quite frankly, ironically.'

He saw the home video revealing the moments before Ramsay walked off the court and collapsed. His heart had stopped.

"I fell over dead, I was gone," Ramsay says. "The difference was, I had an EMT who was in the gym at the time who saw me stumble and literally fall flat, rolled me over, and called 911."

Two EMTs hired by the church started doing chest compressions, using a nearby AED to twice try to shock Ramsay's heart back into a normal rhythm.

Northeast Georgia Medical Center interventional cardiologist Dr. Falgun Patel says their quick response played a huge part in Ramsay's survival.

"Because if the brain doesn't get blood for more than two minutes, it starts causing damage," Patel says. "And after three minutes, it causes permanent damage."

Michele Ramsay, who was in her room at the center, rushed to the gym, where the EMTs were performing CPG.

It was nerve-wracking, but there was also a sense of peace," she says. "Everybody around me was calm.

"We'd only been married at that point, not even a year and a half. And I thought, this can't be the end of our story. It took too many decades to get here."

Rushed miles away to Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, Ramsay had four blocked arteries.

Dr. Patel and his team inserted a balloon pump to stabilize his heart until they could get him into the operating room for a quadruple bypass.

"It's open-heart surgery in which we conduct the blood around the blockages and get more blood to the heart muscles," Patel says. "This is usually done when you have multiple blockages, more than one, and very complex blockages."

And today, five months later, Ramsay has fully recovered.

"I feel great," he says. "I go to cardiac rehab 3 times a week, I'm up to about 45 minutes of pretty strenuous workout. I didn't realize the extent to which the blockages, you know, inhibited my ability to breathe and feel well."

Brad Ramsay says he is eating better and exercising more.

Having cheated death once, he is not worried about the future, he says.

"We have to live, in my opinion, and God's in control," Ramsay says. "The end of the day, God's in control. I'm only here because of his grace, quite frankly."