Joyce Smith answered the phone. It was her son John, saying he’d be home soon. Three minutes later, the ice on Lake Sainte Louise cracked, and John and two eighth-grade friends, Josh Sander and Josh Rieger, plunged into the 40-degree water.
At five minutes to noon, the phone rang again. It was Rieger’s mom, Cindy.
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“There’s been an accident,” she said. “You need to come to the lake. They’ve just pulled John out of the water, and he doesn’t have a heartbeat.”
When firefighter Tommy Shine lifted John from the lake, the 14-year-old had been submerged for 15 minutes. His lungs were full of lake water, and he was covered in lacerations from the ice’s glasslike edges. Paramedics rushed him to SSM St. Joseph Hospital West. By the time Joyce reached the hospital, the emergency physician on duty, Dr. Kent Sutterer, didn’t have much hope.
John hadn’t had a pulse for 47 minutes, and the medical team had been performing CPR for almost a half-hour.
“When I walked into the room, I didn’t realize they were about to call time of death,” Joyce says. “There was a very large man performing CPR on John. There were probably 25 people in there, from the pharmacy, from respiratory therapy, and just other emergency people. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this guy is just crushing my son,’ because the CPR was just so violent. Dr. Sutterer told me later they call the parents in to see what’s being done to their child so they are willing to let them go.”
She walked to the edge of his bed and put her hands on his feet. “They were so gray and cold,” she recalls. Joyce did the only thing she felt she could do: pray.
Seconds later, someone shouted, “We’ve got a pulse!”
Once John’s vitals stabilized, he was airlifted to SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center. Still, his blood pH (or acidity) was 6.6—below what’s typically survivable—and he had only brainstem function. He could breathe only with the help of a ventilator. John’s white blood cells were being eaten up faster than they could be produced.
Dr. Jeremy Garrett told Joyce and Brian Smith that their son was on the verge of organ failure. He likely wouldn’t survive the night. Even if John survived, his oxygen-starved brain had been profoundly damaged.
“Do your best. God will do the rest,” Joyce said. “But I want no negatives to be spoken around him. When you are in the room, I only want him to hear positive things.”
The next day, Dr. Garrett was stunned to discover that John was still hanging on.
Then, on the third day, John woke up. He recognized people. They asked him about his favorite basketball players, LeBron James and Michael Jordan. He answered correctly, with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Doctors were elated—and bewildered. Not only should John not be alive, but they also couldn’t explain how he had survived nearly an hour of oxygen starvation with no apparent brain damage.
John was still having coughing fits, due to an intense inflammatory reaction in his lungs (the technical term is ARDS, or Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome). Dr. Garrett says the reaction was due to a number of factors, including “circulatory shock, direct pulmonary ischemia and likely irritation of the tracheobronchial tree from aspirated gastric contents, lake water, debris & organisms.” Yet seven days after awaking, John went off the ventilator. He walked out of Cardinal Glennon 16 days later—nearly two weeks ahead of schedule.
His parents credit the power of prayer. After John’s story went out on social media, Joyce began getting hundreds of texts a day from people around the world who told her they were praying for her son. Dr. Garrett calls the case “a bona fide miracle.”
John returned to Living Word Christian School within two weeks of leaving the hospital. And beyond school? He can often be found at the St. Peters RecPlex, shooting hoops with Josh Rieger and Josh Sander.
UPDATE (July 21, 2015): An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that a biopsy of John’s lungs had been taken, and that the sample had come back sterile. In fact, cultures of his tracheal secretions were sent, and failed to grow organisms. We sincerely regret the error.
