http://www.emsresponder.com/web/online/Top-EMS-News/Woman-Resucitated-After-Heart-Stopped-for-45-Mins/1$11890Her condition became so bad she and her son Justin, 13, needed to move into her parents' home in north Waterloo. That move would be her first stroke of luck.
The second came on the night of Aug. 30, when Kristine, Justin and parents Howard and Maggie were watching The Stone of Destiny. Kristine was too tired to finish the film and went to bed. Luckily, Justin followed her, with plans to tuck her in. Kristine barely made it to her room before she collapsed on the bed. Her heart had stopped. Justin shouted for help.
That brings us to her third stroke of luck. About 35 years ago, her mother had taken CPR lessons when Kristine was learning to swim. She never needed to use those lessons. Until now.
Maggie burst in and immediately began recalling those CPR instructions that had been buried deep in the recesses of her brain.
As Howard called 911, she frantically worked to bring her daughter back to life. Kristine was already turning blue.
"Justin was saying ‘Mom! Come back! Come back!' " Maggie said.
Paramedics and firefighters soon came, and began using a defibrillator to shock her heart into showing some movement on their monitor. They applied the device 11 times. For the family downstairs, it felt like hours. When they finally carried Dyck out of the house on a stretcher, the paramedics had found a weak pulse. But her heart had stopped for a full 45 minutes, and the chances of anyone recovering from that are never good.
An ambulance rushed her to Grand River Hospital, where a team of emergency room doctors surrounded her bed. Around midnight, one of them pulled Justin, Maggie and Howard into a little room. They braced for the worse.
"I remember thinking this is the kind of place where they tell relatives someone has died," Maggie said.
Instead, they explained their plan. They would immerse Kristine, still in a deep coma, in ice. They wanted to drop her body temperature from 37 C to 32 C to reduce swelling in her brain and slow all neurological activity. Brain damage is a very real danger for anyone whose heart has stopped that long, and the doctors saw no other choice.
Justin sat there, trying to absorb what they were telling him. Earlier that month, his estranged father had died, and he lost the chance to get to know him. Now, barely a teenager, he was facing the prospect of losing his mother, too.
The doctors began pumping Kristine's body full of drugs. One would induce paralysis, because without it she would shiver in the ice, and that would increase blood flow to her brain. The other would wipe her memory of this brutal procedure, to reduce her trauma.
"As they're telling you this, you feel kind of numb," Howard said, remembering that sleepless first night in hospital. "It just doesn't sink in."
The following day, the doctors slowly raised Kristine's body temperature. Three days later, they started easing off on the drugs that kept her in a coma. Remarkably, though still unconscious, she started responding to doctors' instructions. They said wiggle your toes, and she wiggled her toes. A week after she arrived in hospital, she began breathing on her own.
But Kristine's recovery was not close to over.
"That week was hard because I didn't know if I was going to say another word to her," Justin said. "And I knew if she did make it, it was still possible she'd kind of forget everyone."
He had a feeling, though, that his mother recognized him. It was something in the way she looked at him as he held her hand.
In the coming weeks, after batteries of tests, doctors finally found what had caused Kristine's illness. She had a tumour the size of a mandarin orange on one of her parathyroid glands at the back of her throat. It was parathyroid cancer - an extremely rare, and difficult to diagnose, disease. The tumour was affecting her glands' ability to regulate calcium in the body, which eventually caused her heart to stop.
Kristine spent nine weeks in hospital. It was a long, blurry stretch of operations at three different hospitals. They removed her tumour - an extremely delicate task, especially for a singer who so prizes her vocal chords. Kristine had been singing for most of her life. Her father was conductor of the choir she sang in.
The doctors dealt with her pancreatitis, which she developed while sick. She was heavily medicated with morphine to treat her pain. She remembers very little of what happened during this period.
Her parents, meanwhile, spent most of this time by Kristine's side, amazed at this recovery that doctors called a miracle. They didn't need to cook much. Waves and waves of food kept showing up on their doorstep from worried friends. Their phone rang steadily, emails of support poured in.
In early November, Kristine spent her first night outside of a hospital since summertime. Her parents looked after her "like a newborn baby," Maggie said. Her scars were beginning to heal, she was getting her energy back. She felt fresh air on her face, something she had longed for all those weeks when she stared out the hospital window. She would learn how to eat on her own again, and slowly, gingerly, get back to a good place.
But Kristine tried not to overthink what she had been through, or why she had survived, with no brain damage, when so many others would not.
"I don't question it too much," she said. "It happened. And it's all good now."
