Joliet man survives often-fatal condition

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Michael Powers exercises in the cardio pulmonary rehab gym at Provena St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois, Tuesday, December, 13, 2011. He survived an aortic dissection and his wife Sharoll has been a big part of his recovery. | Joseph P. Meier~Sun-Times

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Updated: January 30, 2012 8:05AM

JOLIET — There is a man living in Joliet who could be considered a medical miracle.

Michael Powers survived a condition that almost nobody survives. Not only did he live, he is nearly the same now as he was before.

In July, Powers, 59, experienced an aortic dissection, the often-fatal condition that killed actor John Ritter in 2003.

“The guy went from being essentially near brain dead with almost no chance of survival, to walking, talking and near normal,” said heart surgeon Michael Tuchek, chief of the cardiac surgery program at Saint Joseph Medical Center.

“Half the patients that have this are dead in 24 to 48 hours. About 10 percent go on to survive,” Tuchek said. “Almost everybody dies.”

That Powers was able to drive himself to a store to do some Christmas shopping on his own five months later is a testament to the power of positive reinforcement and the benefit of forward-thinking doctors.

Tuchek said the fact that Powers’ wife never left his side throughout his hospitalization was a key part of his recovery.

Powers’ wife, Sharoll, literally never walked out of the hospital, spending all her time talking to her husband and helping with his rehabilitation.

“Having this most dedicated person taking care of somebody, this made all the difference in the world for this man,” Tuchek said.

‘As of right now he’s alive’

Michael Powers’ crew with the city of Joliet’s public works department wanted to get a head start on the day, as triple-digit temperatures were forecast for July 20.

They were working a couple of blocks away from Saint Joseph Medical Center. Powers was cutting a pipe when it happened.

“The last thing I remember was the one equipment operator digging the hole,” Powers said. “They told me I was cutting a hunk of pipe … and I guess I cut it to length and that’s about it. I don’t remember too much else.”

A co-worker saw Powers drop the saw and clutch his chest. Since he had heart problems of his own the year before, he recognized the symptoms.

He asked Powers if his chest and arm hurt, and he said yes. The crew immediately put Powers in their tool truck and drove him to the hospital.

“They told me later that I was fighting him when they were trying to put me in the truck. We were only a couple blocks from St. Joe’s, so those guys probably saved my life.”

Powers’ symptoms looked like a heart attack, but it was more than that.

“It sounds or looks like one thing but turns out to be another,” Tuchek said. “Unless you’re tuned in to what it could be, like dissection, you won’t find out. Dissection is severe pain, you think you’re having a heart attack.”

Powers, who said he had never been sick a day in his life, had tried blood pressure medication in the past but didn’t like the side effects. He stopped taking the medication and tried diet and exercise instead.

However, the pressure evidently continued to build.

An emergency room nurse called the Powers’ house that July morning looking for Sharoll.

The nurse said Michael was there, but wouldn’t give details of his condition over the phone.

“I could hear him in the background saying, ‘Don’t bother her, she’s got to get ready to go to work.’ I was thinking, ‘OK he’s got to have stitches or something, no big deal.’

“I could hear her urgency in her voice and I said, “Can you tell me anything?’ She said, ’I can tell you as of right now he’s alive.’”

‘Get that woman a chair’

An aortic dissection occurs when the aorta, the large blood vessel that branches off the heart, tears, usually from high blood pressure on the artery. When blood pumps through the tear, it causes the layers of the vessel to separate — something Tuchek likened to peeling apart layers of toilet paper.

Once the artery begins to split, it can either crush or shear off the openings to vital organs as it goes, Tuchek said. If blood stops flowing to the organs or to limbs, they die.

In Powers’ case, the dissection compressed the artery going to his kidneys, which weakened the blood flow, as well as his left leg.

Tuchek was in a board meeting that morning, the first day that the hospital began using a new code system for moving cardiac patients into the catheterization laboratory more quickly.

Powers’ condition set off the system 10 minutes into the meeting, alerting Tuchek to his predicament.

“About 30 minutes later … everyone’s beeper starts going off, my cell phone. I’m thinking what the heck?” Tuchek said. “Lo and behold, the patient didn’t have a heart attack, they found out he had an aortic dissection, giving him the look of a heart attack.”

Cardiovascular Doctor Daniele P. DiGirolami, who was in the cath lab, told Tuchek that Powers needed immediate open heart surgery.

When Sharoll arrived and walked into the room where Michael was, his blood pressure dropped close to normal levels.

“That’s when Dr. DiGirolami said, ‘Get that woman a chair!’ So I sat right there next to him.

“He had to leave the cameras in Michael. So I was watching it on the screen, as he was bleeding out,” Sharoll said.

‘The prognosis was zero’

Tuchek and DiGirolami soon began a 10-hour surgery that involved taking Michael off life support and freezing him into hypothermia to protect his brain while they worked on his heart.

“He had a heart attack. Then it knocked off his kidneys. He had a stroke,” Tuchek said. “You pack their head in ice and shut their brain down, put them in a coma essentially.”

A patient can be hypothermic for longer than an hour, then revived, he said.

Afterward, the doctors told Sharoll that Michael may not wake up the same person he once was.

“Everybody had to give you the nuts and bolts of it. It is what it is,” she said. “The prognosis was zero, and I said, ‘No it’s not. He’s in this.’

“(It took) just a lot of prayer and a lot of faith and just believing that we’re going home. And we did.”

Michael started to wake up the next morning, Sharoll said. He responded to doctors asking him to blink and move his arms and legs.

“On the second day he knew it was me,” Sharoll said. “I said, ‘Good morning,’ and he actually turned his head and rolled his ear closer to my mouth so he could hear me.”

Then doctors put him in a medically induced coma for several weeks. When he woke again, he experienced acute organ failure, Sharoll said.

Five and a half weeks later, however, Michael was ready to move to RML Specialty Hospital in Hinsdale, a facility that focuses on weaning patients off mechanical ventilators.

The Hinsdale hospital is where Michael began to regain consciousness. It is the first place he remembers after being at work that day in July, he said.

By September, Michael was ready to transfer to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

“They got him up and he actually took six steps with the parallel bars that first day,” Sharoll said. “I just kept telling him, you know what? We’re walking home. We’re not going home until we walk home.”

By Oct. 1, he was ready to go home. The hospital gave him a walker, but he didn’t need it.

Back to normal

Sharoll went home for the first time since July on the day before Michael was discharged. She wanted to get the house ready for him. She had to install bars along the bed and tub for him to hold onto, and she moved their bedroom to the first floor.

Michael’s co-workers came over to help her accomplish all that, he said.

They planned a celebration party for
Oct. 9, and invited all their family and friends — as well as Tuchek and DiGirolami, who both attended.

“We took pictures, and we got him to come in (to the hospital) a week later and brought him up to the intensive care unit,” Tuchek said. “All the nurses were crying. It was one of those rare situations (where) someone everyone thought was going to be either dead or have a vegetative state was almost normal.”

Now the flurry of daily multiple doctor appointments have thinned out, and Michael is on medication and going to rehabilitation and check-ups each week. He credits everyone from the doctors’ expertise to his co-workers’ quick action in getting him to the hospital for saving his life. Most of all, he credits his wife’s devotion.

“I probably wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for her,” he said.

Sharoll returned to work for the first time since July this month. She sounded torn about leaving him alone.

Sharoll said near-constant prayer is what got her through the stress of Michael’s condition. That, and their children — Sharoll has four kids, Michael has two — taking care of the house and periodically staying with her in the hospital

“Lots of prayer. Prayer, prayer, prayer,“ Sharoll said. “It was positive, positive, positive. Always look on the bright side and find the good in everything and it will happen. And it did.”