Alexandra, 37

“My heart stopped beating for 62 minutes.”

Benjamin, Alexandra’s husband, recounts.

“It’s May 21, 2021. I’m playing video games in the kitchen of our house. Alexandra is sitting on the living room couch, watching a TV show. She makes a strange noise, like snoring. I go over to check on her. I realize she isn’t snoring—she’s having a medical emergency.

I call 18. I follow the instructions I’m given and place her in the recovery position. But her hands are turning blue. Her heart has stopped beating… I begin CPR. I learned how to do it during the National Defense Preparedness Day. I never thought I’d have to use it on my wife one day…

The ambulance crew arrives and takes over the CPR. To no avail. They can’t revive her. The doctor approaches and tells me they’ll keep trying for another ten minutes. Probably because I told him our two children were sleeping upstairs. They really wanted to do everything they could.

After ten minutes, the doctor comes back to me and takes me aside. We talk, with the machine’s continuous beeping in the background—the sign that her heart had stopped beating. The team is about to stop CPR.

Then, all of a sudden, the beep changes. Her heart has started beating again. It’s a miracle.

Alexandra was transported to Amiens University Hospital, where she was admitted to the intensive care unit. After a period in a coma, she gradually came back to life. She was in a state of extreme weakness, and the road ahead would be difficult.

“One day, I came in and she recognized me. She spoke to me. I asked her if she wanted to marry me. She said yes.”

Alexandra adds.

“Rehabilitation will take several months; I’m really very weak. I feel dizzy, as if I were on a boat. I’ve been diagnosed with epilepsy. I’m on medication and have medical appointments all the time.

I have to relearn how to walk, talk, drink, and eat, and get my brain and memory working again, and so on. My rehabilitation at the rehab center lasted three months, which isn’t very long for someone who’s suffered a cardiac arrest of that duration. I then continued my rehabilitation at an outpatient center near my home for several months.

Very gradually, I’m becoming a woman, a mom, a coworker, a friend again… To the doctors, I’m a survivor.”

Alexandra and Benjamin wanted to share their story. They enlisted the help of Aurore, Benjamin’s best friend, an author and librarian in Compiègne. They wrote a book titled “62 Minutes,” which also served as a form of therapy.

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