Chris LaPage remembers nothing from the day he almost died.
In fact, most of his memories were wiped clean and slowly came back as he recovered. He had forgotten the moose he had seen the day before he collapsed at work and the new truck he had purchased the month before. Even the passion and love he once poured into training his beloved bird dog, Sky, was gone.
“Just what they told me,” LaPage said Wednesday in the service area at Banks Chevrolet. “Other than that, I don’t remember that day at all. I picked up my boss in the morning and don’t even remember that.”
He’s a service technician at Banks Chevrolet, wiry with a long goatee, and on that day, May 3, LaPage went into cardiac arrest at his work station, collapsing in the bed of a new truck while drills and air hoses fired their sounds across the titanic work area.
After 90 seconds, a chain reaction of communication among Banks workers, 9-1-1 personnel, paramedics and firefighters kicked into gear, stabilizing LaPage’s heartbeat and getting him to the hospital and on his way to a full recovery.
That’s why a ceremony was held Wednesday, at the spot in the Banks service area where LaPage went down. To honor the rescuers and rejoice in LaPage’s life-after-near-death experience.
“I just want to thank everyone,” LaPage told an audience of family and emergency personnel, while those same drills and hoses continued to work.
“It was a rough day, but I’m very thankful, my wife is thankful, both my boys are thankful,” he said. “Everybody came together to save my life. It’s about these people, not about me.”
That was a common theme during the celebration. Team, team, team. In fact, one person, who played a major role in saving LaPage’s life, declined to give his name.
The cast of characters ran through several departments. Eventually, a shorter list of those in the trenches that day surfaced.
Banks service manager Mike Mercer started the relay race. He found his old friend slouched in the truck bed, his face purple. He checked an artery in LaPage’s neck and felt nothing.
“I looked around and thought, ‘Who will help me?’ ” Mercer recalled. “There was a deer-in-the-headlight look. I wondered who will play ball with me. It was Mike Maynard.”
Marti Dennerly, the New Hampshire 911 dispatcher that day and a 16-year veteran, told Mercer and Maynard to move LaPage to flat ground. She asked if the company carried an automated external defibrillator, or AED.
(A tip of the hat goes to the Banks company for actually having one on the property).
Dave Bednar of Banks retrieved the AED and the two men attached the sticky pads to LaPage’s chest.
Mercer listened to Dennerly and drew on his own experience, as the husband of a nurse practitioner. He’s known as a low-key guy. He was the right man for the job, pushing the shock button twice when LaPage’s heartbeat became erratic.
His colleagues call him Mr. Ice.
Rescue personnel took it from there. Beth Davin, the lead paramedic on the call, said LaPage was near death in the ambulance, still devoid of a pulse, still plagued by an abnormal heart rhythm.
“With our crew,” Davin explained, “we continued CPR and we did some other treatment and when we got to the hospital we got him back, we got a pulse.”
His heart rate straightened itself out. Without the happenings of that day, the quick responses, the cool under pressure, the teamwork, Davin said LaPage would have died.
Only later did the magnitude here smash head-first into Mercer.
“It’s an adrenaline high,” Mercer said. “After that, you tend to sit down back at the office and ask what happened. My first thought was, ‘I know what happened.’ ”
LaPage spent three weeks in the hospital and missed 2½ months of work. Once the commendations had been handed out on Wednesday, LaPage moved into the small crowd, to his wife, Deb, and a more personal side emerged about the man with the second chance.
LaPage was a star athlete at Coe-Brown Academy, graduating in 1992, and he married an old high school friend 25 years later.
Deb LaPage smiled a lot, cried a little. She described her husband this way: “The hardest working man and strongest man I know. He teaches his boys to love, be kind and always have your head up and he has taught me that as well.”
Mercer has worked at Banks for 33 years, LaPage for 25. Each morning, on his way to his giant office out back, LaPage walks past the smaller office and says, “Good morning,” according to Mercer.
“Every single morning,” Mercer said. “Everyone loves him. He never says no. He works six days a week. I call him a good-ole boy. He does his job.”
The horror of that day seven months ago remains clear to Deb. She was working, a special ed teacher at Epsom Central School, when a call came in: her husband was receiving CPR. At that very moment.
Chris’s outlook was good by the time Deb got to Concord Hospital. He’s been eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and salad since returning home. He likes oranges.
He never liked to sit down for long. He wanted to blow the leaves off his roof when he first got home. Deb vetoed that idea. He caught a six-pound bass soon after.
He’s back hunting and fishing. He’s emphasized to his 14-year-old twin boys that “life can change quick and you learn to adjust and adapt and better yourself with the whole thing.”
The impact here is as big as the Banks service center. The Banks family offered to certify their employees in CPR. Chris and Deb got certified.
Meanwhile, those memories Chris lost have come back, with Deb’s help. He quickly recalled his bird dog, Sky, the time he’d spent prepping him for action, the times they’d gone out hunting together.
He says he has no physical restrictions. He has only one mental restriction, and that’s not a bad thing.
“The wife brought in photos and it came back to me,” LaPage said. “The only thing that didn’t come back was that day.
“I don’t remember that day.”