CREATIVE MEDICAL SCIENCE
On November 12, 2021, Don Hopper rode his bike for thirty miles after work, a customary practice. That evening he suffered sudden cardiac arrest. His wife, Becky, started CPR and called 911.
At North Memorial Hospital they started hyper-thoracic therapy and prepared to insert a stint into his left coronary main artery. And then on Sunday, it happened again, another cardiac arrest. This time the doctors began to prepare him for a pacemaker and defibrillator.
Tuesday morning Don woke up just long enough to request a specific defibrillator, one he had been working on for twenty years, which had just been released two months earlier. They implanted the pacemaker and defibrillator on Thursday and by Saturday, the 20th, he was released from the hospital.
“When we work on medical devices,” says Don, “we build them as if they were going to be used by family. We build them so they won’t fail. But I never realized in all those years that I was building it for myself.”
One of the questions Don has been asked is why he survived two cardiac arrests when many others have not. It would be easy to say that it was because he worked on the very device that saved his life. But that is not the answer Don gives.
“I refer them to scripture,” says Don. “God is the giver of life. He allowed me to go through this, but it was not my time to die. Our times are in His hands.”
Don Hopper is happy that he has the privilege of working on medical devices that save lives. But he is even happier to know that his life is in the hands of the One who created, sustains and preserves life itself.
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