As months pass since Jim Hoffman experienced a massive heart attack last December, the coincidences that led to his survival pile up like winter coats on a snow day. There’s just no way of getting around them.

Bingham lives in Dundee and works as a nurse for Providence Home Services’ Yamhill branch. She was headed to Costco with her young family on Dec. 9 when her eye caught the situation on the side of the road.

“I looked around at the situation and it looked chaotic, people (were) running everywhere,” Bingham told the Newberg Graphic later that month. They pulled their car over, and she ran to the nearby van where she found a 54-year-old man turning blue. His wife was on the phone trying to direct 9-1-1.

His son was on the ground, praying to God for his father, and his daughter had just pulled up behind them.

“It was pretty emotional,” Bingham said. “I thought, ‘This guy’s dead, they’re never going to get him back.’”

The Hoffman family had been wondering much the same thing.

not feeling well

Since the previous day, Jim Hoffman, a civil engineer for Mowat Construction Co. in Portland, had been milling about his Wilsonville home, chopping down and bringing in the Christmas tree, putting up lights and changing the oil in the car.

Despite the activity, nausea had come in waves, but he attributed it to his tendency toward stomach irritability or perhaps a touch of the flu. By day’s end, the nausea had subsided.

On Sunday morning, the Hoffman family, including Wilsonville High School freshman Lucas, and his sister Vanessa, a student at the University of Oregon, went to church, had breakfast and then returned home to decorate the tree.

“All I remember is that I was sick,” said Jim, who now has returned to work. “I never had any of the symptoms of a heart attack, other than the nausea.”

His wife Jody called it “really bad stomach pains,” and made some calls to friends with a medical background. They suggested getting him to the hospital quickly.

Jody and Lucas climbed into the front seats of their van, while Jim opted to lie down in the back. Vanessa followed in her own vehicle. By the time they left their street, headed down Brown Road and then turned onto Wilsonville Road, Jody realized her husband’s health was seriously declining.

“By that time, I understood that it was more than I had originally thought,” she said. “I got into the left-hand lane, and that was pretty much when he died on us.”

Lucas had been holding his father’s hand when Jim stopped breathing and his hand went limp.

“My son let out a blood-curdling scream that I can’t describe,” Jody said. “He was really fearful for his father. We both witnessed his death in the car. It wasn’t a pretty sight. We both thought he was dead.”

Jumbled thoughts raced across the stage of Jody’s mind:

“My husband’s father died when he was 12.”

“I’m going to be a widow.”

“I’ve got to start working full-time.”

Lucas had his own thoughts, Jody said.

“He thought he would have to be the man of the family, just the way his father had when his father died,” she said.

Judy quickly looked up, asked God for help, then got her phone and began to call 9-1-1. She pushed the buttons on the phone and hit send, but there was no connection. Three or four times she tried. Still no connection.

In frustration and perhaps fear because his father was not breathing, Lucas jumped out of the van and fell to his knees in prayer.

“It was obvious this was really serious,” said Jody. “He didn’t know what to do.”

Soon, another car stopped to help. The couple had a cell phone and Jody used it call 9-1-1 again. After a couple of tries, Jody had a dispatcher on the line and began giving directions.

“This was the start of many miracles as God intervened,” Jody wrote later in a Christmas letter to family and friends.

Confusion over their location sent the ambulance in the wrong direction. Finally, they saw the rescue truck headed their way, only to watch it turn and head toward Burger King across the street.

“Lucas (our sprinter, which is another miracle) ran across Wilsonville Road and chased it down,” Jody wrote in her letter.

In the meantime, Lisa Bingham was approaching the scene.

A not-so-typical day

It started as a typical day for the young family of five. Bingham had visited some patients in the morning, came home and made a casserole. Their kids were taking a nap and Lisa and her husband debated over whether to bake the casserole right away or go to Costco and buy mattresses for their new bed.

“He said, ‘Let’s get the kids up now and go,’” she said. “You don’t expect that the regular things you do every day would make a difference. We never get our kids up early.”

But they did, putting them in the truck and making their way to Wilsonville.

Bingham used to be a CPR instructor, but had never had an opportunity to help someone outside of a hospital setting. And she’s never been able to use her skills to keep someone alive.

That fact is not unusual. Only about 8 percent of people in Jim’s state are able to live to tell their stories.

Seeing the chaos that now surrounded the Hoffman’s van, and their son on his knees was enough to get the Binghams to stop. Her husband pulled over and she jumped out of the truck. She didn’t know how serious the situation was until she saw the color of Jim’s skin.

“It took me aback when I saw him,” she said. “I knew we would have to get him out of the van.”

“Lisa started taking over the whole situation,” Jody said. “Nobody knew what to do. I was frustrated because my husband was not breathing. Up to that point, it had been five to 10 minutes of a lot of people stopping, but not knowing whether to move him or what to do while I was on the phone with 9-1-1 trying to get them to come.”

Bingham instructed onlookers to pull Jim from the car and lay him on the ground. She was going to do CPR until the medical personnel could arrive.

“It took about four people to pull him out and she started the CPR,” said Jody.

Bingham said she worked on Jim for close to 10 minutes before the EMTs were able to take over. Several times, the EMTs shocked Jim’s heart before they got a steady rhythm. Quickly, he was loaded into the ambulance, with Jody by his side, and headed for Legacy Meridian Park Hospital.

“I asked the EMT if he was gone and he said it did not look good,” Jody wrote in her letter. “When we were on the way to Meridian Park Hospital, I asked him again and he said the same thing, but I said I would just keep on praying.”

Vanessa’s faith encouraged her mother. Vanessa did not believe her father would die. Yet, Jody said her husband was “virtually dead” when they arrived in the emergency room.

It was soon discovered that Jim had had a massive heart attack involving two places in a right artery. Doctors put two stents in to restore blood flow, then put him in a hypothermic state for 36 hours to preserve brain function because he had been without oxygen for so long.

With Jim on his way to the hospital, Bingham and her family resumed their trip to Costco, but called the hospital later to find out how Jim was doing and visited with the family every day either in person or by phone until Jim returned home on Thursday. She spoke to him for the first time on Friday.

“It sounds crazy,” said Bingham, “that we just went on to Costco. I sobbed all the way through Costco. It was such a shock. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so we decided to just finish what we set out to do.”

In her Christmas letter, Jody summed up the events that followed: “(It was) a whirlwind of miracles that includes a couple I did not know who took our car and the kids to the hospital, a cardiologist that just happened to be catching up on paperwork on a Sunday and checked his messages as he was going out the door, an ICU nurse, my lifeline, who just happened to be working for three days and is an expert on the type of care Jim would need, wonderful staff at the hospital, and family members coming together.”

As for Jim, he had no recollection until the following Wednesday, about a day after the doctors warmed him up.

“They give you amnesia drugs while you’re in the hospital,” he said.

Jody continued to see improvement in her husband.

“They warned us that he might not wake up and breathe on his own, but he did immediately,” she said. “They said he might have brain damage, and he did have short-term memory loss for a couple of weeks, but he got better and better as time went on.”

By mid-January, Jim was back at work.

“They were worried about the memory loss,” said Jim, who had to wear an alarm in the hospital because he couldn’t remember why he was there and wandered around the halls. “But it didn’t seem to be a problem, which you can attribute to the excellent care from Lisa, the paramedics. Everything got taken care of very well.”

Lisa Bingham was recognized by Meridian Park Hospital in a ceremony April 14 for her quick action in administering CPR and saving Jim’s life.

“I’ve known CPR for a long, long time,” said Jim recently. “I came to the realization that on that day, nobody else did until Lisa came. It’s just a miracle, and I thank the Lord for miracles.”

Bingham related similar feelings.