OMAHA, NE — Potholes, the menace of spring, get no respect. Nobody loves them. Everybody hates them. One of these craters was sitting in the middle of Interstate 80 west of Omaha doing what it does best: breaking tire rims, flattening tires and turning the air blue with angry profanities.
Then this: The lowly pothole saved a life.
A Gretna, Nebraska, ambulance crew was rushing a 59-year-old man to the hospital on Monday, April 15, when the pothole rose from the ground in a flight of glory. The transported man’s heart was racing at 200 beats a minute, twice a normal, healthy rate.
It was a life-or-death situation. Each minute mattered. The man’s heart continued to pound. The ride would be 20 minutes. The man needed to get to Omaha’s Lakeside Hospital. The chances of him suffering a stroke or going into sudden cardiac arrest increased with each beat of his out-of-control heart.
His heart was working too hard. The pothole, as it turned out, was working just hard enough.
The speeding ambulance hit the crater.
Bam!
With that jolt, the man’s heart returned to a normal rhythm.
“It’s rare, but it’s a well-described phenomenon,” Dr. Andrew Goldsweig, a cardiologist at Nebraska Medicine, told news station WOWT. “One way to treat that is with an electrical shock. Classically, you’ll see it on television. The paddles, ‘Clear,’ and a big jolt.”
The hero pothole isn’t the only road nemeses credited with saving a life, according to Goldsweig, who’s familiar with the phenomenon. He said that in a well-documented case in the late 1970s, a patient’s heart rate was restored to normal by a speed bump.
No word on whether the previous traffic calmer was any relation to the newest crater to save a life.