MIDDLEBURG, Pa. (AP) - Richard Jordan’s heart stopped for 15 minutes March 6.
The paramedics had stopped administering CPR after the 48-year-old tree trimmer from Middleburg was electrocuted with 7,200 volts of electricity, but then a miracle happened. Jordan’s heart started beating again, a full quarter-hour following the accident.
Three months and 12 days later, Jordan is recovering, stunning everybody. He returned home April 19, a little more than six weeks after the accident.
“They thought I was going to be brain dead, they thought I was going to be a vegetable,” said Jordan, the owner of Jordan Tree Trimming. “I got a lot of exercising to do. They say it’s going to take a long time. Hopefully it comes sooner than later.”
Jordan is living with Stephanie Neary, 46, his girlfriend of four years, at their Middleburg home on Swinehart Drive.
Neary said she was “scared, panicked and lost” while waiting for Jordan to recover in the hospital. When she was finally able to see him in the hospital two days later, she said she knew “from the first moment” that he was going to make it.
“He was my superhero before,” Neary said. “I could never tell him enough how amazing he actually was. I just knew he was going to get through it. Every day he didn’t prove me wrong.”
What happened?
Jordan and his crew were working at the corner of East Market and East Willow streets in Middleburg. It was only supposed to be two trees - a 15-minute job - but Jordan and the owner had discussed doing a third tree that was touching the high voltage lines. While up in the bucket truck at approximately 10:45 a.m., the electricity arced over to him like a bolt of lightning despite never coming in contact with the wire, Jordan said.
It takes 50 milliamps of electricity to stop a human heart, which could be the electricity coursing through a 7.5-watt light bulb or Christmas lights, according to information provided by PPL at various safety events around the Valley.
Richard Jordan said he doesn’t remember anything after that moment until he woke up in the hospital three weeks later. Witnesses at the scene saw it happen and said Jordan at first passed out in the bucket truck. His father, Harry Jordan, was on the crew that day when a co-worker came rushing behind the home to tell him what had happened.
“I ran around, and there he was knocked out in his life, the cage,” Harry Jordan said. “After 30 seconds or a little longer, he started thrashing, he started kicking his feet up and down in the lift.”
Richard Jordan was seizing, and he fell out of the bucket into the tree, then 20 feet to the ground.
“When I come around, I thought he was gone,” Harry Jordan said. “He was lifeless, just laying there.”
Jordan was transported by Middleburg Fire Company Ambulance to Penn Valley Airport in Selinsgrove before being flown via Life Flight to Geisinger in Danville. His heart stopped for the second time on the air transport, but medics were able to restart it. He was then transferred to the burn unit at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown later that day. After leaving Allentown, he was discharged after 13 days from the Moss Clinic in Philadelphia on April 19.
Grace Jordan, his mother, calls her son a “walking miracle.”
“He shouldn’t have survived that,” she said.
His injuries
The electricity burned a hole in his left hand where it entered his body, traveled up his arm and out the top of his head and also down his right arm and out his right forearm. Doctors had to take skin from his upper arm to graft onto his left hand and stitch and staple his arm and head back together.
From the fall, his hip was broken in two places, his eye socket and nose bones were crushed, his brain was bleeding, several organs were ruptured and his lungs were punctured from multiple broken ribs. He required a feeding tube during his hospitalization and required a walker until he was able to be mobile.
“I can walk now,” he said. “The other day I tried jogging a little bit, I jogged across the yard and across the Dollar Store parking lot, to make sure my leg wasn’t going to give out. My leg is still a little numb.”
His hand doesn’t open as far as his right hand, but still gets stiff. He expects it to be back to normal eventually.
Before the accident Jordan said he could bench press 400 pounds, but now he is working out at 75 pounds. His mental capacity and memory is not what it used to be.
Harry Jordan credits his son’s “strength, and the support of prayers and the work the emergency crews did” for Jordan’s survival and recovery.
“I’m expecting to get back to 100 percent,” Richard Jordan said. “I exercise every day here. I try to do a total body workout.”
Jordan said his main goal is to return the work of tree trimming. He still requires physical therapy to grow his strength and agility.
Grace Jordan thanked God, the emergency and medical responders, the churches, neighbors, friends and family for all the help, prayers, cards and gifts.
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Online:
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Information from: The Daily Item, http://www.dailyitem.com
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