Man Urges People to Seek Help After His Wife Dies of Asthma Attack

Man Urges People to Seek Help After His Wife Dies of Asthma Attack
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Laura Levis had an unlikely death. The 34-year-old woman was a competition powerlifter, hiker, and fitness enthusiast in her free time. But Laura suffered from an asthma attack and lost her life to it. Since then, her widowed husband, Peter DeMarco, has become an advocate for asthma and has been sharing his wife’s story in order to help save other people’s lives.

When Laura suffered an attack in September 2016, she thought she could manage it alone as she had been doing so for 10 years. However, after a short walk at 4 a.m. when she arrived at CHA Sommerville hospital in Massachusetts, she was faced with a lot of unexpected events and thus missed the brief window of opportunity to get the help she needed.

According to an essay written by her husband for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA) in 2019, that morning, she decided to walk alone to the hospital, as DeMarco was away and calling an Uber would take a couple of minutes. However, when she arrived, she couldn’t get into a locked door leading to the emergency room, and no one was at the security desk. She then called 911 in desperation outside the hospital emergency room.

Laura struggled to get the operator to understand what was happening. In an article for the Boston Globe, DeMarco wrote that “some 10 minutes passed between the time Laura called 911 and the time she was found, in cardiac arrest following a devastating asthma attack. Those 10 minutes meant her life.” 

The ICU staff at CHA Cambridge Hospital, where she was transferred, did everything possible to revive and stabilize her, but Laura died of hypoxic brain injury a week later on Sept. 22, 2016. DeMarco then penned a moving letter thanking the doctors and nurses who tried to save her life and cared for her. This letter also appeared in the New York Times and went viral.

However, as DeMarco later went over all the reports from emergency services and the hospital, he became aware of how the initial response to her call had failed. As per his written account in the Boston Globe, Laura’s call to 911 came from a cell phone and as a result was routed to a regional 911 operator who was 18 miles away rather than the local police. Unfortunately, the person who received that call couldn’t send direct help to her and therefore connected the call to the local police, who asked Laura again what happened. The local police called the emergency room, and a nurse came to look for Laura, who was 70 feet away on a bench, but the nurse didn’t see her.

Finally, it was the firefighters who found Laura. They followed her footsteps up the hill that led to the emergency room. Firefighter David Farino was the first to spot Laura and began CPR. However, Demarco explains that “Farino had taken just three minutes to walk up Tower Street. But those three minutes were just long enough for her life to slip away.”

He further added: “It had pushed the time Laura had gone without oxygen to her brain to upward of seven minutes, and while a heart can be restarted at that point, as hers was, people rarely survive. She didn’t.”

While DeMarco has devoted himself to addressing the failures of the emergency response system, he has also directed his efforts at asthma sufferers. “Everything that happened that day was outside of Laura’s control,” he wrote in the essay for AAFA.

As per the 2019 Asthma Capitals™ report, more than 25 million Americans suffer from asthma, and almost 10 people die each day due to asthma. DeMarco hopes that his wife’s preventable death could help save someone else’s life. In a public-service-announcement video for the AAFA, he said: “When you have an attack, factor in the unexpected. Your inhaler could be defective. You could get stuck in traffic. The hospital door you go to could be locked.”

DeMarco further states in the essay, “When an attack strikes, don’t be alone – tell someone as soon as you can. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for help or think that by telling someone you are letting asthma win.”

He further states, “Without oxygen, you have between three and six minutes to live. Telling someone you’re having an attack could save your life. That is how you beat asthma, by living.”

Watch the video: