by Malcolm Butler
Wes Gregory couldn’t breathe.
It was late on a hot summer’s night in August. Wes and his family had just returned home from vacation to the beach.
But as he sat on his bed, he knew something was wrong. Really wrong.
Wes dialed his wife, Lanie, who was on the other side of the house with their youngest daughter, Lesley. It was the night before the first day of a new school year for Lesley, and Lanie was trying to get her settled.
“She is my child that won’t sleep,” said Lanie. “So, I was laying down with her trying to get her to sleep. When he called my cellphone, I knew something was wrong. He said, ‘I can’t breathe.’”
So, Lanie came running.
“It was late,” said Lanie. “I was panicking. He was panicking.
“I ran in there and said let’s get in the car and go to the emergency room. He was like, ‘I can’t make it to the car.’ So, I called the ambulance.”
Although Lanie said the events from that night are seared in her memory, Wes said he doesn’t remember a whole lot.
“The last thing I remember was the paramedic getting here and him asking me, ‘What is wrong,’ said Wes.
The paramedic was Captain Chris Butler from the Ruston Fire Department. Captain Butler had rushed from Station 3 on the north side of town off North Trenton Street along with ambulance driver Artur Christian and firefighter Lake Horton.
“Three minutes felt like three hours,” said Lanie, admitting that the ambulance arrived very quickly. “They did get here fast, but when you are panicking, it felt like forever.”
“When we arrived on the scene, (Lanie) met us outside and said (Wes) was having trouble breathing,” said Captain Butler. “You could tell she was in a lot of distress herself. (Wes) was sitting on the side of the bed in a position where you could tell he was having trouble breathing. He was tripod breathing; he was leaning over and couldn’t catch his breath.”
Wes was fighting for his life.
“I reached over and grabbed his shirt and said, ‘I need you to keep me from dying,’” said Wes. “That is the last thing I remember.”
“He did grab my shirt, and said, ‘You got to help me,’” said Captain Butler. “I told him that’s what we were there for.”
_______________________________
Wes Gregory moved to Ruston in 2012. He laughs in telling the story, admitting he didn’t really have a choice if he wanted to stay married to Lanie.
Having grown up in Magee, Mississippi, his only connection to Ruston was Lanie, who grew up here until her family moved to Magee when she was a junior in high school.
However, according to Wes, in 2012 she told him she was moving back home.
“I guess I really didn’t have much of a choice,” said Wes, grin on his face.
Prior to move to Louisiana, Wes had served as both a volunteer firefighter in Magee and a full-time firefighter in Brandon from 2002 until 2012. It was something he loved.
“I never thought about being a fireman,” admitted Wes. “I am that guy. I could pass a wreck on the road, and it would freak me out.”
According to Wes, living in a small town like Magee, he knew the chief of the volunteer fire department who was also the owner of the local NAPA store. That’s the connection that started his path into a decade in the profession.
“I started working with the Magee Volunteer Fire Department, and I really liked it,” remembered Wes. “I liked helping people.”
_______________________________
As Wes was transported from his bedroom to the ambulance in his driveway laying on the gurney, Lanie was right by his side.
“They got him out to the ambulance, and I was looking out the windows, and they were doing the bag,” said Lanie. “(Captain Butler) came out, and I was like, ‘Is he okay?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah he is breathing and talking some.'”
According to Captain Butler, he was still trying to determine exactly what the issue was while trying to stabilize Wes’ breathing.
“His pulse ox was in the 50s or 60s … very low,” said Captain Butler. “As soon as we got him into the ambulance, we put him on a CPAP that forces air to expand your lungs. His O2 stat only improved to about the 70s so we could tell he had something else going on that the oxygen wasn’t fixing.”
Lanie and her mother followed the ambulance in her car to Northern Louisiana Medical Center. And as they arrived at the emergency room, things took a turn for the worse.
“When we got close, we saw through the little back window of the ambulance … we could see them doing CPR,” said Lanie. “They got him out of the ambulance, and there was a guy on top of him on the stretcher. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Captain Butler did.
“As we were transporting him through downtown Ruston, we could tell something was changing and he wasn’t breathing,” said Captain Butler. “The CPAP requires (the patient) to breathe in to get the air, and we could tell he wasn’t responding well to that. He started to decline.”
So off went the CPAP mask.
“We started chest compressions,” said Captain Butler. “We were a couple of minutes away from the hospital and this decline happening pretty quickly.”
_______________________________
Wes Gregory knows what it’s like to save a life.
In 2010 when he was still working for the Magee Volunteer Fire Department, he and his colleague John Rankin were part of such a heroic task.
The date was January 21, 2010. Wes remembers it well.
“When you are working at a professional fire station, you sleep there,” said Wes. “But not when you are working for a volunteer fire department. I was at home in my bed when we got the call.”
Wes and John and their team arrived on the scene within minutes, beating the full-time firefighters to the location.
“That’s almost unheard of because of response time,” said Wes.
On that night, a mobile home had caught on fire. The owner, James Stephens, had taken his children to another house, called 911 and then re-entered his burning home to try to put the fire out.
However, the smoke had overcome him.
“When we got there, John and I were the primary attack team,” said Wes. “We were going down the hall, and we found him. He had been overcome by smoke. We found him lying in the hall, and the back of the trailer was on fire.
“We did what we do. We dropped the hose, and we grabbed him.”
After carrying Stephens out of the trailer which soon became engulfed in flames, Wes and John and their team performed CPR. Stephens lived.
Wes said he will never forget that night.
“You don’t get that often,” said Wes. “It’s a lot of finding people for closure. Getting people out of car wrecks. It’s just something special when you do get to save someone’s life.
“It takes a special kind of idiot to run into a burning house. But once you do it and have the training, it’s an adrenaline rush like nothing ever.”
_______________________________
After being intubated at Northern Louisiana Medical Center, an ambulance transported Wes to Christus Highland Medical Center in Shreveport the next morning. The doctors still weren’t 100 percent sure what was causing his breathing issues.
On Friday morning, Lanie was told they were going to take the tubes out to see if Wes could breathe on his own.
Lanie and much of Wes’ family were in the waiting room, anxiously awaiting news from the medical staff.
“Fifteen minutes goes by,” said Lanie. “Thirty minutes goes by. And I was like, ‘Did they forget about us?’ We didn’t dream anything bad would happen. So, we were like, ‘Let’s sneak back in there.’
“So, we snuck back in there and turned the corner and every nurse and doctor were in his room. We knew something wasn’t right.”
The assumptions were correct.
“The doctor came out and said, ‘Well, it didn’t go so well. We had to put it back in,'” said Lanie.
Wes had taken a few breaths on his own after the tube was removed and then almost immediately started turning blue.
According to Wes and Lanie, this is when doctors went from thinking it was a lung issue to believing instead it was a heart issue.
Wes was suffering from a pulmonary edema caused by a prolapsed mitral valve.
The mitral valve controls the flow of blood from the heart’s left atrium to the left ventricle. A prolapsed mitral valve means that the valve’s flaps do not always fit and close properly between each beat of the heart, which may cause the valve to leak blood backward through the valve back to the left atrium.
Wes’ was simply not working.
“They said it looked like at some point mine had all fused together,” said Wes. “And then it just popped. That’s what allowed my lungs to fill up with blood. And that’s why I couldn’t breathe.”
“His lungs just filled up with fluid,” said Lanie.
According to Wes, doctors had discovered years earlier that his mitral valve wasn’t working perfectly. However, he had also had it checked a few weeks earlier and there weren’t any major concerns at that time.
“They thought it was a lung condition because I couldn’t breathe,” said Wes. “The mitral valve they knew about, and I was being treated for it, but it wasn’t severe so that’s why they were focused on it at the beginning. I had just been to the doctor two weeks before and had an echocardiogram, and everything was okay.”
Once doctors discovered the real culprit, Wes started to slowly improve.
“They want you to breathe for an hour on your own before they will take the tube out,” said Wes. “Well, I was lying flat on my back. I would lay there for 45 minutes or an hour and breathe and breathe and breathe, but by the end of the time, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
“The pulmonologist came in and said, ‘He has mitral valve issues, why do we have him lying on his back?’ It wasn’t letting the valve open like it needed to. So, they sat me up at 60 degrees and over the next two hours, I was breathing good.”
Tubes came out on Tuesday.
“I think that’s really when I turned the corner,” said Wes. “Once they got it out and figured out that I needed to be sitting up, it was like someone flipped a switch.”
But surgery was still needed to fix the problem completely. So, Wes underwent heart surgery on August 27 where doctors completely replaced – not repaired — his mitral valve.
“After the surgery, the surgeon came in and told us he had never seen a mitral valve that bad where someone survived it,” said Lanie. “The chords on his were fused together and it popped like a rubber band.”
Wes began rehab and was discharged to go home on September 1.
“I now have a carbon fiber mitral valve,” said Wes. “If you listen closely, you can actually hear it (clicking).”
_______________________________
Wes Gregory and John Rankin were honored by the state of Mississippi as the Mississippi Firefighters of the Year in 2011.
“The state knows how special it is,” said Wes. “They made a big deal out of it. I got an Act of Valor Award from the state.”
It’s not an honor he took lightly.
Wes now has the unique view of being on both sides of the equation. The life saver and the one whose life was saved.
“I know what it’s like,” said Wes. “The police. The firefighters. They don’t get enough credit. They don’t make the money they should. It’s those rare things that you get as a win that truly makes it worth it. If you can just save one person … You see people on the worse day of their life. They are looking at you to make a difference.”
On October 1, Wes and Lanie and daughters, Lily and Lesley, and his in-laws David and Kathy Williams, all went to the Ruston Central Fire Station to personally thank Captain Butler, Artur Christian, and Lakin Horton for their part in saving his life.
“It was really special to go up (to the Ruston fire station) and see those guys,” said Wes. “It brought back a lot of emotion and memories from when I was in the fire service.”
According to Wes, James Stephens came up to the fire station in Mississippi to personally thank he and John more than a decade ago.
“Just saving one person makes your whole career worth it,” said Wes. “There are guys who go through their entire careers of 25 or 30 years and never get that opportunity. Those stories, my story, usually turns out to not be good news.”
The gesture meant as much to the Gregory’s as it did to the men who were a part of that August day.
“It’s very rewarding to see the difference that we can make,” said Captain Butler. “It may happen more than we want, but when we get to meet him a months later, it’s very rewarding.
“Knowing that (Wes) has a firefighter background, and he can relate to it. He knows what we have been through, and we know what he has been through.”
Butler, Christian and Horton were all presented with a sticker in the presence of the Gregory’s that day by Ruston EMS Director David Wells. The sticker is an image of the Grim Reaper behind the red “no” sign, or prohibition sign (see photo below) for their individual firefighter helmets.
“In college football helmet stickers are given for individual and team achievements,” said Wells. “It has decades of tradition.
“That day death came for Mr. Gregory and this sticker will serve as a reminder that their efforts made a difference in his life and our community’s lives.”
It’s something Wes won’t soon forget.
“Everybody cared,” said Wes. “It wasn’t just a job. They were personally invested in me. They were all just amazing. They saved my life. The folks at the Ruston Fire Department and Northern Louisiana Medical Center … they saved my life. The folks at Christus Highland Medical Center. All of them.
“It was God’s hand all over it.”
_______________________________
It’s been a slow recovery process for Wes.
However, he hasn’t complained. He knows how lucky he is.
“We had so many people call and text and pray for him,” said Lanie. “I believe that is what did it.”
And according to Wes, the support has been overwhelming.
“You talk about the Ruston community … it’s a good place,” Wes said with tears welling up in his eyes. “When something like this happens, it makes you think about everything and evaluate what you are doing to see what is really important. Everything else is trivial. Ruston is such a good place to be.”
Wes recently went back to work at Courtesy Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Ruston where he has been employed since moving to town in 2012. He may not be 100 percent yet, but he is well on the path to a full recovery.
And as Thanksgiving rolls around, thankfulness has a new meaning to him.
“Everything, every part of my life right now, has a different meaning,” said Wes. “Thanksgiving, especially. Any time I’m with family, it’s different. It just feels different. In the past you get so caught up in everything. And you are like, ‘Oh yeah, we are thankful for family and ….’ And everyone says the same thing, but this year I am especially thankful for family and community.”
Wes and his family attend The Bridge Community Church. And according to him, it’s a Thanksgiving tradition for members to go on camera and say one thing they are thankful for each year.
This year, it was impossible to keep it to just one.
“This year mine was two lines,” said Wes. “My family was thankful for our family, but I was also thankful for health and for faith and God’s grace. Without that, I’m not here today.”
