CHARLESTON, SC NEWS - LIVE 5 WCSC Breaking News, Weather, SportsCofC student dead for 37 minutes, brought back to life
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CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - His mother says everyone calls her son the "miracle boy" and after hearing his tale of collapsing, being without a pulse for more than a half hour and then being revived, it's hard to disagree.
"Most of the time people don't live after that, I'm good, I'm lucky," said Stephen Brown. The nineteen year old has a potassium and magnesium deficiency which affects his heart. Last November he went into cardiac arrest for the second time in two years.
"I was in the library, I was walking down the stairs. I passed out and yelled out to this girl. I was down for 42 minutes," he said.
The College of Charleston sophomore was rushed to MUSC. For 37 minutes he didn't have a pulse. That's when the medical team started a procedure of inducing hypothermia after cardiac arrest.
"They began cooling him immediately in the emergency room, and afterwards in the coronary care unit," said JoAnne Naylor, a nurse with the Coronary Care Unit.
Naylor brought the procedure to Charleston from Virginia Commonwealth University four years ago. Stephen's mother is happy she did. When she first got the news, it didn't look good.
"Literally the phone call was that he was not going to make it," said Susan Brown.
But the cooling down procedure worked. Naylor says she's never seen someone recover the way Brown has.
"Usually if you suffer from cardiac arrest and you are without a pulse for more than a few minutes, you can suffer devastating neurological injury," added Naylor.
Stephen woke up after a one-week doctor-induced coma. It took him a month to learn how to walk and eat.
"I am very fortunate. It makes me look at life in the bigger picture," said Brown.
The procedure not only brought Brown back to life, it changed the direction he wants to take it.
"I wanted to be a physical therapist. Now I want to go to med school and become a doctor," he said.
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