Mashpee man runs a half-marathon 3 months after cardiac arrest
At 5:15 a.m. on February 3, 2025, Matt Critz suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. The Mashpee resident, 61, was one of the fortunate ones. The mortality rate for a sudden cardiac arrest that occurs outside the hospital is 90 percent, according to the American Red Cross. But on that morning, Critz was one of the lucky ones.
He woke up that morning, went into the bathroom and crashed to the ground face down. If it had happened while he was sleeping, he never would have woken up. If it had occurred just 10 to 15 minutes later, his girlfriend, Katie McBrien, would have already left for work. Even though it was not part of their usual routine, McBrien decided to go say goodbye to him before she left and found him lying on the floor.
At first, she thought he must have gotten dizzy. She rubbed his back and asked if he was okay. When he lost control of his bladder, she knew he wasn’t. She called 911 and tried to turn him over, but he was wedged in a small doorway. She ran downstairs to get help from her tenant. The tenant helped her flip Critz over and McBrien began doing CPR.
Sudden cardiac arrest is typically a result of ventricular arrhythmias, coronary artery disease or other structural heart diseases, according to Colleen Overstreet, FNP-BC, a nurse practitioner at Cape Cod Healthcare Cardiovascular Center - Hyannis. Other causes include opioid overdose, pulmonary embolism and upper airway obstruction, she added. Sometimes, as in Critz’s case, there is no discernible cause.
Critz was very fortunate. Sudden cardiac arrest is the sudden cessation of cardiac activity, Overstreet explained. When that occurs, the victim becomes unresponsive with no normal breathing or signs of circulation. If it is not corrected rapidly, it can progress to sudden cardiac death, as doctors suspect happened to Food Network star Anne Burrell on June 17.
Part of the miracle of Critz’s story is that McBrien had just done CPR training three weeks earlier, so she knew exactly what to do. The first police officer to arrive at the scene was Nicholas Carpenter, who was a former student of McBrien’s from Mashpee Quashnet School, where she taught English for 27 years.
Officer Carpenter took over the CPR and, when the EMTs arrived, he led McBrien out to the kitchen to get some personal information about Critz. The EMTs used an automated external defibrillator (AED) to restart Critz’s heart. Then they hooked him up to a LUCAS device to give him continuous heart compressions while he rode in the ambulance to the emergency department at Cape Cod Hospital. At the hospital, Critz was quickly moved to the cardiology ICU.
Everything Lined Up
“Everything had to line up perfectly for this to happen,” Critz said, looking back on the ordeal three months later. “I feel so blessed. Katie’s coworker’s brother died from cardiac arrest and they couldn’t save him. Normally that is what you hear – that the person passed away.”
When McBrien arrived at the emergency department she assumed Critz had suffered a heart attack.
“At that point, I knew nothing about the difference between sudden cardiac arrest and a heart attack,” she said. “In my mind they were the same thing. They are actually very different. One is electrical and the other occurs when there is something wrong with the heart. With sudden cardiac arrest you don’t always have something wrong with the heart – like Matt.”
After one of the doctors explained what was going on, McBrien looked around the room she was in and saw multiple boxes of tissues and a lot of bereavement pamphlets. She followed the doctor out into the hallway and asked if she should be calling Critz’s ex-wife and two college-age daughters. The doctor said that she definitely should.
“They were having conversations with me at the hospital like, ‘We’ll see how he does over the next 24 to 48 hours. If he’s not coming out of this by 72 hours, then we need to start having other conversations.’”
Luckily, Critz did come out of it. He was moved to another room and the doctors spent the next few days running tests to see what could have caused the sudden cardiac arrest. They couldn’t find anything wrong with his heart but they did place a defibrillator in him in case his heart stopped again.
“Everything in his heart was working perfectly and they likened it to the plug of a lamp being pulled out of the wall. They have no idea why it happened,” McBrien said.
Grateful to Be Alive
“I don’t remember any of it, so it was never traumatic for me,” Critz said. “My first memories of the hospital were five days later. My daughters and my friends and two of my sisters from the West Coast were there, and I was just like, ‘What’s going on?’”
When he found out what happened, his next memory is being grateful that he didn’t die because McBrien had lost her husband to pancreatic cancer five years earlier and he was so glad she didn’t have to go through the pain of losing another loved one.
After five days in the hospital, Critz came home. He started walking the next day and walked nearly every day afterwards. He went to his post-operative evaluation with cardiologist Karl Stajduhar, MD, 23 days later. Since he doesn’t have an actual heart condition, his care has now been transferred to Overstreet, who monitors his defibrillator.
Even though it isn’t always easy to know when a sudden cardiac arrest will occur, Overstreet said sometimes there are symptoms that could indicate trouble.
“With symptoms of shortness of breath, chest pain and increased level of fatigue, patients should follow up with their primary care physician or with a cardiologist if already established,” she said.
Back to Life
When Critz asked Overstreet when he could get back to his normal routine and start running again, she assured him he could start immediately,
“There’s nothing wrong with your heart. There’s no reason to think it’s going to happen again, so go pursue happiness,” she said.
Even though his running times are much slower, Critz did start running again. Critz and McBrien both belong to the Mashpee Milers; A Run Walk Collective that meets every Wednesday evening in Mashpee. Participants either run or walk a certain route and then meet up for snacks and beverages afterwords.
On May 3, three months from the day of his sudden cardiac arrest, he ran a half marathon along the coast of Maine. He and McBrien joined a Facebook Group, Sudden Cardiac Arrest Survivors, which reminds them just how fortunate Critz was. McBrien also sent an email to everyone on Critz’s care team thanking them for the excellent care he received.
“Whenever I talk about what happened to me, I just remind people to get CPR trained,” Critz said. “The last thing that you want is for one of your loved ones to die because you don’t know how to help them.”
On April 28, Critz earned his certification.
“I went to the Red Cross in Hyannis and I took a class with Katie’s brother and a couple of my friends and there was about four or five other people,” he said. “It’s so painless. It’s so easy. It’s two hours of your time and they not only teach you how to do CPR but how to use the AED. They also taught us how to do it on children and infants.”
