On June 25, 2025, Chris Smythe finished a round of golf, drove home, and collapsed in cardiac arrest at the end of his driveway in Louisville, Kentucky.
What happened next reads like a chain of rescues no one could have scheduled. A nursing student happened to be driving past. She stopped and called Chris's mother, a nurse who lived nearby, and she ran across and started CPR on her own son. Another woman was out walking her dog. She was a nurse too. Together the two women kept his heart going until an ambulance arrived and rushed him to Baptist Hospital.
The doctors' verdict was blunt. "That day they told my son I had a 2% chance of survival and 0% to talk to me again," Chris later recalled. He lay in a coma for eight days while physicians told his family he would not leave the hospital. His children refused to accept it. "Dad's just resting, he's going to wake up," they said, over and over.
He woke up. He recovered so completely that he was back at work with his construction crew on August 15, 2025 — less than two months after his heart stopped. One of the nurses who worked on him later told him she had felt his last pulse that night.
Chris's daughter named what the family had watched unfold: "look at all the little miracles that happened to get to this big miracle." And Chris responded to the big miracle in the most concrete way a person can. Since his recovery he has been baptized, with what the local news described as a returned passion for faith. Baptism is a public act — going under the water and coming up again, a picture of the death he was spared and the new life Jesus gives.
He hasn't kept the rescue to himself. Chris now volunteers with the American Heart Association's Hard Hats with Heart, urging fellow construction workers — a trade he says carries a high risk of heart disease — to learn CPR and how to use an AED. "If you're an employer, or you're in a group, or youth sports, learn CPR," he says.
A man given a 2% chance is alive, back at work, baptized, and helping others stay alive. If God can meet someone at the end of a driveway with a stopped heart, He can meet you exactly where you are. No odds required.