Somewhere between 10:20 and 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, May 29, Kate McIntyre’s heart malfunctioned. The 32-year-old mother of two, stepmother to two, and cupcake entrepreneur was riding her bike on Apperson Street into Salem. It’s believed that she was following the route she and her husband of five months, Tim, rode together just three days before. She was climbing the Colorado Street Bridge when she collapsed "like a rag doll."

Unconscious and still clipped into her bike pedals, the amateur cyclist gasped for air.

Several motorists stopped, including Al Wooldridge, Cheryl Staver, Stephen Hughes and three others.

According to senior police officer Mark Stuart, she was still taking shallow breaths when he came on scene a minute later. Staver, an athletic trainer at Roanoke College, was monitoring her vital signs while the officer assessed the scene. Within a minute or two, McIntyre stopped breathing, and Stuart called the Salem Rescue Squad while initiating CPR with Staver and another bystander.

Her heart was quivering, and she was turning blue. "Then I think God sent an angel out; then the cardiac surgeon showed up on scene," Staver said. Dr. Joseph Rowe, a cardiac surgeon at Carilion in Roanoke, just happened to be driving over the Colorado Street bridge.

A cyclist himself, Rowe stopped to see if he could be of any help. "She looked really bad, you know … I was worried that she wasn’t going to be a survivor," he said.

Rowe used his extensive experience in reviving patients to provide McIntyre with CPR until more help arrived.

Four Advanced Life Support providers, senior firefighter paramedics, were on scene, together. Within five minutes, McIntyre had been defibrillated five times.

While McIntyre’s heart had started beating again, "a lot of times we get a beat back and it’s just the drugs. Often, we’re just kind of prolonging the process," Mike Mabe said. In fact, McIntyre’s body was fighting to stay alive.

Rushed to the emergency room, Salem police tried to identify McIntyre. After finally tracking her bike down through Cardinal Bicycle, Tim was contacted. As soon as he arrived in the emergency room, he contacted family and church members, many who were already praying for the family.

The longest two days of the Roanoke couple’s marriage ensued. She was placed in a drug-induced coma, during which Tim pieced together the chain of events and began blogging Kate’s story on their business’s Web site. There was a chance that she might never wake or function normally again.

Only about a week earlier, "we had talked about it," and the couple had agreed to take care of one another, even if incapacitated. "But when you’re faced with it, you’re thinking … I didn’t mean now," Tim said.

She awoke that Friday night, sobbing and trying to talk with her feeding tube in place. "Little victories were very big that night," Tim said.

During her six-day recovery, Kate’s brain reached out to fill in some of the gaps, some more like chasms, that had widened while her brain was without oxygen. At some points, she failed to recognize Tim as her husband, and is quoted saying, "I was bass fishing, and I fell off the boat, and there were mollusks and anemones, and that’s what happened."

A week later and a world away, Kate was still in the hospital as a therapy patient, with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, surgically inserted. Her only noticeable injuries were bruises and tiny scabs from IV sticks on her arms.

She even went to the Galax String Festival last weekend, June 14. Tim writes in his blog: "She is totally able to take care of herself. ... she can still get lost when trying to find a destination, and sometimes gets derailed in the middle of a task and can’t remember what she was doing. Other than those small things, you’d never know what has happened to her. Praise God!"

Kate said, "It’s a miracle that all the players were there at certain points. The people who’ve called and said that ‘I’ve had faith in God, but this just took it to a whole new level,’" make what happened to her worth it.

"Since I’ve been sick, all these wonderful things have happened for other people, my own inner family," she said.

Tim added, "if I could put things back to where they were before this happened, I wouldn’t ... as long as you’re as okay as you are."

For more on Kate's recovery, go to their website at www.hoppindots.com

Miranda Adkins, So Salem
News-June 20, 2008 edition

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