CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The Corpus Christi Heart Ball is happening tonight and one local man is being honored as this year's featured survivor.
A little over 10 years ago, Bill Lathrop JR. experienced a heart attack. While that set him back for some time, he shares that the challenges that heart attack brought him were no match for his doctors and his love for running.
Lathrop had been running for some time before he decided to try a runner's ultimate challenge.
"When I turned 40 years old, me and some friends of mine decided we wanted to run a marathon," Lathrop said. "None of us had run that far and so we started running marathons and had a lot of fun doing it."
Lathrop was an active and relatively healthy person.
That all changed on Oct. 1, 2013.
"When I was 55 years old, I was training for a marathon and I laid down to go to sleep one night and I died from sudden cardiac death," Lathrop said. "My heart lost it's electrical connection."
Lathrop's wife performed CPR until EMS arrived. Once at the hospital, he was hooked up to a ventilator and placed in a medically induced coma.
Before that, Lathrop had gone 15 minutes without oxygen. To preserve his brain function, one of Lathrop's doctors, Dr. Thomas Alexander, made a decision to treat him with therapeutic hyperthermia treatment.
"The way we treat to prevent brain damage is sometimes to cool patients down or just prevent them from getting fevers and that's what we did with him," Alexander said.
What's more remarkable is that after all this, he wakes up and he's now back running marathons.
"I can remember the first time I went to cardio rehab and one of the nurses she said 'Well, you won't ever run again' and I said 'Yes, I will,'" Lathrop said.
Against all odds, Lathrop continues to run. Just last week, in celebration of his 66th birthday, he made his way to Austin to run another half marathon. This is something that he plans to keep doing with appreciation for his second chance at life.
"I spent Sunday morning running with 19,000 of my closest friends for my birthday and we had a good time," Lathrop said. "On to the next one. We'll find another one."
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