A spry couple of 57 years, Oliver and Beverly Ferrill’s marriage nearly ended over an early dinner at Charlie’s restaurant on Ga. Highway 54 West in Fayetteville two days before Christmas.

This was not a lover’s quarrel, but it was a matter of the heart. Oliver’s heart. While unbeknownst to anyone it stopped beating, Mrs. Ferrill noticed her husband’s blank stare.

“I said, ‘quit staring’ and he didn’t listen to me and didn’t move,” Beverly Ferrill said. “I started to poke him with my cane and I realized something was especially wrong.”

As she grabbed her 81-year-old husband to shake him, he fell over, and two guardian angels swooped in. A cashier and a customer called 911 and began CPR on Mr. Ferrill.

Both actions were crucial because without CPR in the first few minutes of a heart attack, the patient’s chances of surviving fall drastically, officials said.

Fortunately in Fayette County, paramedics and EMTs take extra steps to restore a victim’s heartbeat beyond CPR and basic measures.

In addition to chest compressions and rescue breathing to maintain circulation, Fayette’s medics are also trained to drill directly into the tibia bone, said Allen McCullough, director of public safety for Fayette County.

That allows for medicine to be introduced into the bone marrow so the medicine can get back to the heart in five seconds, McCullough said. The average national time to administer those drugs is about eight minutes, but Fayette has gotten it down to about two minutes, McCullough said.

Those actions were taken in Mr. Ferrill’s case, along with defibrillation to shock his heart back into rhythm, “and a lot of praying,” McCullough said.

“I always said kind of an internal prayer on every resuscitation for God to give us strength, let us be technically proficient and then let it be God’s will,” McCullough said. “... Even though you drill it all the time and you think you’re good at it, it’s always different when it’s a critical situation and you’re dealing with a real person. And at that point you need all the help you can get.”

Oliver Ferrill, who was hospitalized several days recovering from the attack, said he is sure who intervened.

“I feel it this way: God brought me back and breathing. I feel like He did it,” said Mr. Ferrill, who lives with his wife in Tyrone.

Fayette’s medics practice their routines, and each one has a specific assignment, so the response for heart attacks is basically automatic, officials said. Every two minutes medics switch the personnel performing compressions because it is a physically demanding process and studies have shown after three to five straight minutes their effectiveness declines, said Capt. Steve Folden, one of the crew members who helped Mr. Ferrill that day.

Fayette’s medics are working diligently to drastically improve the heart attack survival rate here, which is currently about twice the national average.

Mrs. Ferrill said she particularly appreciated how kind and sweet the medical personnel were during the ordeal. McCullough had Mrs. Ferrill speak briefly with her husband just before they put him in the ambulance.

“You said, ‘I love you, hang in there, don’t die on me,’” McCullough recalled. “Actually you were saying it in a pretty forceful manner. It was an order.”

Though eight staffers including McCullough worked on Mr. Ferrill, Mrs. Ferrill said to her “it seemed like a whole army of people.”

Beverly Ferrill said before the medics arrived she remembered the cashier and another Samaritan pumping and pumping on her husband’s heart as they performed CPR and mouth to mouth rescue breathing.

“The cashier said he learned CPR in high school but said he had never used it before,” Mrs. Ferrill said.

Ferrill was so grateful for everyone’s help that she contacted The Citizen for this story. For the medical personnel it was a rare chance to learn of a good outcome. Federal medical privacy laws generally prohibit paramedics and EMTs from learning about how their patients do once they are left at the hospital.

The only way they tend to hear about success stories like Oliver Ferrill’s is when a family member or the patient themselves calls to offer thanks, officials said. Mr. Ferrill was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

“This means the world to us,” said Lt. Scott Roberts, another medic who helped work on Mr. Ferrill along with medics Justin Brooks, Norman Gibby, Dan Kolman, Paul Evans and Charles Duff.

Having her husband back, Mrs. Ferrill said, has brought blessings to the couple.

“I really though we had all the love we could have loved each other in 57 years,” she said. “But we appreciate life itself even more. Everything is more beautiful.”

Speaking with the very people who saved her husband’s life recently, Mrs. Ferrill said she would be eternally grateful for their actions, and she knows they don’t do it for the pay.

“I could never repay you,” she said. “But you have given me my husband back and that is the most wonderful thing in the world.”