Laura Levis had an unlikely death. The 34-year-old woman was a competition powerlifter, hiker, and fitness enthusiast in her free time. But Laura suffered from an asthma attack and lost her life to it. Since then, her widowed husband, Peter DeMarco, has become an advocate for asthma and has been sharing his wife’s story in order to help save other people’s lives.
When Laura suffered an attack in September 2016, she thought she could manage it alone as she had been doing so for 10 years. However, after a short walk at 4 a.m. when she arrived at CHA Sommerville hospital in Massachusetts, she was faced with a lot of unexpected events and thus missed the brief window of opportunity to get the help she needed.
Laura struggled to get the operator to understand what was happening. In an article for the Boston Globe, DeMarco wrote that “some 10 minutes passed between the time Laura called 911 and the time she was found, in cardiac arrest following a devastating asthma attack. Those 10 minutes meant her life.”
However, as DeMarco later went over all the reports from emergency services and the hospital, he became aware of how the initial response to her call had failed. As per his written account in the Boston Globe, Laura’s call to 911 came from a cell phone and as a result was routed to a regional 911 operator who was 18 miles away rather than the local police. Unfortunately, the person who received that call couldn’t send direct help to her and therefore connected the call to the local police, who asked Laura again what happened. The local police called the emergency room, and a nurse came to look for Laura, who was 70 feet away on a bench, but the nurse didn’t see her.
He further added: “It had pushed the time Laura had gone without oxygen to her brain to upward of seven minutes, and while a heart can be restarted at that point, as hers was, people rarely survive. She didn’t.”
While DeMarco has devoted himself to addressing the failures of the emergency response system, he has also directed his efforts at asthma sufferers. “Everything that happened that day was outside of Laura’s control,” he wrote in the essay for AAFA.
DeMarco further states in the essay, “When an attack strikes, don’t be alone – tell someone as soon as you can. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for help or think that by telling someone you are letting asthma win.”
He further states, “Without oxygen, you have between three and six minutes to live. Telling someone you’re having an attack could save your life. That is how you beat asthma, by living.”
