Tennis teammates help Camas man during heart attack

If not for his fellow league members, Jason Hill doesn’t think he’d have survived the heart attack that struck him during practice late last month.

Hill, of Camas, was practicing Feb. 28 at Evergreen Tennis, when he started feeling ill.

“I had been playing singles league matches for a while, and I decided I was going to practice with the doubles team to try and get some doubles skills,” he said, recalling what he can and relaying what his teammates told him.

“Apparently, I was playing doubles pretty well, but I was looking disoriented and grabbing my chest and coughing a lot.”

Hill was told he didn’t really seem to know what was going on, and the other players insisted he sit down.

Andy Thorburn was there practicing, too. After Hill took a seat, Thorburn said, Hill got back up and went into the clubhouse bathroom.

“Luckily, one of his teammates followed him into the clubhouse to make sure he was going to be all right,” Thorburn said.

Hill had been playing doubles with Tom Wheatley, and Wheatley went to make sure Hill was OK, Thorburn said.

Wheatley heard him fall, then opened the door to find Hill on the ground with his eyes open.

“I’m sure there was a part of me that was like, ‘You’re going to go home and sleep this off,” Hill said.

Wheatley hollered to tennis center staffer Cassidy Brennan to call 911, and she also grabbed the facility’s automated emergency defibrillator.

Mark Choi, another player and a nurse, said someone ran to the courts and asked for anyone with medical training.

Hill didn’t have a detectable pulse, Choi said, and his breathing was labored.

“I knew something wasn’t right ,” he said. “Luckily, Cassidy was already on the phone with 911.”

Choi started CPR and tried the defibrillator. Firefighters arrived soon after.

Hill was told later his was a tough case.

“They’re shocking, I guess, the hell out of me,” he said. Wheatley, a former police officer, told Hill he’d never seen anyone shocked that many times.

“It wasn’t looking good,” Thorburn said. “But he made a tremendous turnaround.”

Fortunately, Hill said, doctors didn’t need to crack open his chest, and instead placed two stents and connected him to a heart pump. They did, however, place him in a medically induced coma for nine days.

What’s been most odd, Hill said, is how his brain was affected.

Hill doesn’t remember much of that day, and his short-term memory, while coming back, is still pretty cloudy.

The last nine months are blurry. He recalled being in tears, when, all at once, he remembered his dog died, his wife had a new job and they had moved to a new house.

“I didn’t even know Chris Cornell had died,” he said. “I instantly had all these emotions … it’s a real shock coming out of a coma.”

Hill is up and about, if a little slow. He walks around the house several times daily as his physical therapy, and starts formal rehab soon. He was just cleared to drive again, and stopped by the tennis center Wednesday to see his fellow teammates, many of whom were surprised to see how well he was doing.

“If Tom wasn’t there to hear me fall in the bathroom — I’m dead,” he said.

There wasn’t much reason to expect anyone else would have heard him fall, Hill said, given the layout of the clubhouse.

“Even before this happened, I used to always say, every day above ground is a good day,” he said. “I just feel very lucky.”

Andy Matarrese: 360-735-4457; andy.matarrese@columbian.com; twitter.com/andy_matter