ST. LOUIS (KMOV/Gray News) – Just seconds before his death, a St. Louis man who nearly died of cardiac arrest vowed to give back two years later.
Tony Meneses is a first-generation Filipino-American who spent most of his adult life in St. Louis working in the IT industry before retiring.
He and his wife of nearly five years, Paula Howard, live south of St. Louis City, but have made a habit of traveling the world together.
And when he's not traveling, you'll probably find Meneses on his bike, participating in rides and races throughout the area.
And it was his healthy lifestyle that made his ordeal even more unexpected. During a party in 2022, Meneses collapsed and eventually suffered cardiac arrest.
“I was fine, I could walk around,” Meneses said. “Then suddenly I was exhausted. I tried to get to my chair and before I knew it, I had collapsed.”
Meneses says he was seconds away from death. He was taken to a nearby emergency room, where doctors tried to resuscitate him for over an hour, but to no avail.
After several unsuccessful resuscitation attempts, doctors told his wife to say her final goodbye. As she did, doctors began disconnecting Meneses' various machines when something happened like something out of a movie.
“I touched his heart and someone screamed, 'I have a pulse! I have a pulse!'” Howard recalls. “Everyone rushed back and started working on him again. They were able to stabilize him. He came back.”
That fateful moment was just the beginning of Meneses' two-year recovery. After being taken to Barnes Jewish Hospital for treatment, he spent the next few weeks in an induced coma. Doctors and his family were still unsure if he would ever be his old self again.
“They told him, 'Tony, you need to shake your wife's hand.' But then nothing happened until one day he did it,” Howard said.
They found that Meneses had suffered cardiogenic shock, a rare heart condition that leads to death in about 90% of cases.
Dr. Joel Schilling, MD, PhD, was part of Meneses' care team at BJC.
“Many people who have a blocked artery in the same place as him that supplies a large part of the heart don't even make it to the hospital,” said Dr. Schilling.[If] If anything went wrong during these steps, his brain would have suffered irreversible damage.”
Meneses' condition was caused by ischemic cardiomyopathy, a more common form of heart disease that affects the heart's ability to pump enough blood throughout the body.
Doctors in St. Louis found Meneses a heart transplant at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. His family helped charter a private plane to ensure he could be safely transported to Mayo.
Having learned to walk, eat and drink again, Meneses is now able to lead a normal life almost two years after his collapse. He can only compare his ordeal to something out of a Hollywood movie and is grateful to the numerous doctors in all three hospitals for saving him.
“It's like 'Saving Private Ryan,'” Meneses said. “They had teams set up that would alternate morning and evening runs.”
Meneses says the efforts to save him were priceless, something he appreciates even more because several of his family members have worked in the medical field for a time.
This is one of the reasons he decided to share this story now. He hopes it inspires others to become doctors and nurses, to help others and save more lives. In the future, he wants to talk to young people about the importance of doctors and maintaining a healthy heart.
Dr. Schilling says two common ways to promote heart health are exercise and a healthy diet. But he adds that severe symptoms, similar to Meneses' case, can come on suddenly.
He says if you start feeling multiple symptoms such as chest pain, fatigue, nausea or extreme shortness of breath, you should see a doctor as soon as possible or, in severe cases, go to the emergency room.
Meneses and Howard plan to return to their normal travel habits while enjoying time with their siblings and children.
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