Sometimes, how we healthcare is revealed when a routine recovery turns into a life-or-death moment and the right people are already there.
When Keith Comeaux couldn’t last 2.5 minutes on an elliptical machine, he knew something was wrong. He just didn’t know how wrong.
What followed was a medical odyssey that stretched across two hospitalizations, two cardiac arrests, a five-day coma, a near-death experience and a recovery that took years to complete. Through every terrifying turn, Keith found himself in the hands of the right physicians at the right moment — something he doesn’t chalk up to coincidence. He calls it a “God wink”.
Keith now walks the seventh-floor hallways of FMOL Health | Our Lady of the Lake Heart & Vascular Institute not as a patient, but as a volunteer.
He visits each patient and their families in their rooms on the seventh floor. He checks on exhausted families in waiting rooms. He sits with people who are scared.
Sometimes, if they’re open to it, he prays with them. He knows exactly what it feels like to be on the other side of that waiting room door because not long ago, his wife Eliska was sitting in one herself, not knowing if her husband would make it through the night.
A Lifelong Health-conscious Person Who Knew His Body
Before his diagnosis, Keith was not the kind of man who sat still. Active and health-conscious, he kept a regular fitness routine and considered himself to be in reasonably good shape for his age. So when his body started whispering that something was off, he listened.
The elliptical moment was the loudest whisper. Two and a half minutes in, and he was done — breathless, depleted and alarmed. For a man accustomed to sustained physical activity, that kind of sudden limitation wasn’t something to brush off. He went to see his doctor.
What they found was serious: Keith had an aortic valve problem that required surgery. At 62, he was headed into the operating room for open heart surgery.
Open Heart Surgery and What Came After
The surgery itself went as planned. Keith came through the procedure and began what he expected to be a straightforward recovery. But the body doesn’t always follow the plan.
Shortly after, something changed. Keith was readmitted to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and within days, the situation turned critical.
The Moment Everything Shifted
Keith was in the hospital bathroom when he collapsed.
What happened next would define everything. A Code Blue was called. Tara Jarreau, MD, his cardiologist who was preparing to discharge Keith, heard the call and responded immediately. Keith’s heart stopped.
“He coded twice,” Dr. Jarreau recalls. The gravity of that moment is not lost on her, or on Keith.
Here is where Keith’s “God wink” comes in — the phrase he uses to describe the series of circumstances that, by any reasonable measure, should not have aligned the way they did.
When Keith coded, there were seven cardiovascular specialists already on the hospital floor. Not summoned. Not called in from home. Already there. The odds of that convergence happening organically, in a hospital the size of Our Lady of the Lake, at that precise moment, were remarkably slim.
Keith doesn’t think odds had anything to do with it.
A Saddle Pulmonary Embolism
A CT scan revealed the cause of Keith’s collapse: a saddle pulmonary embolism, a massive, life-threatening clot lodged at the main branch of the pulmonary artery, blocking blood flow to both lungs simultaneously. It is one of the most dangerous forms of pulmonary embolism, carrying an extremely high mortality rate.
The team moved fast. Dr. Jarreau and her colleagues in the cath lab initiated life-saving interventions to break up the clot and restore circulation. Keith coded a second time. Each time, the team brought him back.
That cardiovascular specialists were present during both events, available, skilled and ready, is the detail Keith returns to again and again when he tells this story.
Five Days in a Coma
Keith spent five days in a coma.
While he was unconscious, his body continued to struggle. His kidneys, stressed by the severity of his condition, began to fail. He required dialysis. The complications were stacking, and Eliska, his wife, was waiting. Praying and hoping.
A vascular surgical intervention became necessary to address additional complications during his coma. The layers of care Keith required — cardiac, vascular, critical care, nephrology — speak to the coordinated complexity of what the Lake team managed on his behalf over those five days.
For Eliska, waiting outside the unit, the ICU and nursing team became anchors during an unbearable stretch of hours.
What Keith Experienced While He Was Gone
Keith woke up on July 31.
But something had happened while he was in the coma, something he didn’t expect and doesn’t entirely have words for. He describes a near-death experience: a sense of leaving his body, of being somewhere else, of encountering a peace that didn’t feel like sleep or dreaming. It was, he says, profoundly real.
He also believes he was called back.
Keith doesn’t share this lightly, and he doesn’t dramatize it. He speaks about it the way people speak about things they know to be true, quietly and with certainty. Whatever he experienced during those five days shaped his understanding of why he survived.
He didn’t make it through two cardiac arrests, a saddle pulmonary embolism, dialysis and a coma simply to go back to his old life unchanged. There was something he was supposed to do with the time he was given.
The Long Road Back
Waking up from a five-day coma is not the same as recovering from one.
Keith had to relearn how to walk. Physical therapy was slow, demanding work, rebuilding strength and coordination in a body that had been through extraordinary trauma. His kidneys gradually recovered. His cardiovascular system stabilized. But the full arc of his recovery stretched across two and a half to three years before he felt truly himself again.
During that time, he processed not just the physical aftermath of what happened, but the spiritual weight of it. He’d been given a second chance. He was certain of that. What he had to figure out was what to do with it.
Gratitude Becoming Purpose
The answer came in the form of an orange shirt.
Keith returned to our Heart & Vascular Institute as a volunteer on the seventh floor, the same floor where he had fought for his life.
He shows up regularly, walks the hallways he once traveled by stretcher and makes his way to visit each patient and their families. He checks on the families in the waiting rooms as they sit with their fears and their prayers. He starts conversations. He asks how people are doing and actually wants to know. When someone seems open to it, he offers to pray.
He is not a chaplain. He doesn’t carry a title that explains what he’s doing there. What he carries is something harder to name: the credibility of someone who has been exactly where these families are sitting.
“I know what it’s like to be in that bed as a patient,” he says. “Because of what Eliska endured during my episode I know what it’s like to have someone you love behind those doors.”
He walks the floor now as living evidence of what’s possible when clinical excellence and genuine compassion converge. He doesn’t preach. He doesn’t perform. He just shows up with a smile, with conversation and with the quiet authority of someone who has seen the other side and chosen, gratefully, to come back.
