Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a clear head. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I spoke gibberish. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant impairments. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.ĭoctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac arrest. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our local hospital. Since one of them involved no serious injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred yards to me. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto accidents close to the tennis center. Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest-something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich.
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