Ted Guloien
Ted Guloien is a social psychologist from Toronto who experienced cardiac arrest during a half-marathon in November 2013, collapsing 250 metres from the finish line. He compiled his reflections into a self-published pamphlet for survivors and brings both professional insight and lived experience to his writing.
“What if it happens again?” and Other Intrusive Thoughts
If you’re like me and other survivors, once you’ve returned home from hospital and life begins to settle down, you begin to think about what happened to you. For most of us, our sudden cardiac arrests came out of nowhere: uninvited and unexpected. We came perilously close to not being alive and, for me at ...
A paradox of dying
After I had a sudden cardiac arrest, I used to tell people that I died. It just felt right because the use of the term was commensurate with the gravity and significance of the event, at least to me. I was clinically dead for 15 minutes or so, with my heart not beating nor my ...
Not my last story
As a survivor of a sudden cardiac arrest, I’m a member of a group of people whose uniqueness is defined by beating the odds of surviving such an event. Since that heart-stopping day, I’ve adopted the cute conceit of telling people that I died. Here’s my confession: I know that I didn’t die. Not quite ...