Bringing back the dead

Many years ago (14 actually) when I was a fairly new ER nurse I worked in a little tiny hospital on the Saint Lawrence Seaway in far upstate NY. We were so far north that we could see Canada across the river! Our ER had four beds and was staffed by a PA. In the summer during tourist season it could be quite a hopping place but in the winter it was just me and the PA. It was January and it was well below zero outside. There was one patient in the department that we were ruling out for an MI. The first set of enzymes were negative and the patient was pain free and asking for lunch.
The PA left to go down and get his own lunch, I was talking to my patient when she said those words that strike fear into every nurses heart....."you know dear, I really don't feel very well." I asked if she was having chest pain, which she denied so I tried to get some more specific information. While I was asking questions her eyes suddenly rolled back in her head and she went out, I glanced at the monitor and saw vtach. To be honest, I almost wet my pant, I was still very new and very wet behind the ears and there I was in the ER alone with a woman who was very quickly heading toward the light. I don't know how long I stood there, it felt like an eternity but it was literally seconds before I snapped to it.
We had a switch on the nurses desk that was basically a silver toggle switch. I toggled it and the code bell started to ring throughout the hospital. From there I ran and got the crash cart. No fancy biphasic lifepack there, just an old Hewlett-Packard defibrillator without pacing capabilities, the pacer was a separate item. I whipped out the paddles, charged up the defibrillator and put them on her chest. At the last minute I remembered the gel, squirted some on and defibrillated her one time. When the tracing returned to the baseline I could see some complexes and checked her pulse, praise the lord - she had one! At that moment the PA arrived and some of the floor nurses upstairs but there wasn't much to do, the patient was concious and to my astonishment still answering the last question I had asked her. My legs were shaking so much I suddenly needed to sit down.
When all was settled the patient was on a lidocaine drip and in the back of an ambulance on her way to Syracuse to have a heart cath after which she had open heart but did very well. She had no recollection of the event, didn't even "see the light" but she did say that she had felt like "being kicked in the chest."
ACLS, Defibrillation and cardiac care has come a long, long way since then. Ive seen a lot of people saved even though it is not like on TV and we don't save them all but it is one of the things that make me love the ER. Sometimes ER nurses get the chance to make a BIG DIFFERENCE!