A local boy survived after his heart stopped beating for 28 minutes in 1953. Here’s more on Bob Hudson’s extraordinary life.
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IDAHO FALLS — In 1953, a local 11-year-old boy’s heart stopped beating for 28 minutes during an operation, and his sister recently spoke with EastIdahoNews.com about this incident and his remarkable life.
The story of Robert “Bob” Hudson was featured in our weekly Looking Back column, which looks back on what life was like during different periods in east Idaho history.
Hudson’s oldest sister, Janaye Berggren — who was two years older than Hudson — said he died on Oct. 11, 2024. Hudson was 82 years old.
Who was Bob Hudson?
Hudson was born May 1, 1942, in Idaho Falls. He was born “very sick,” was a “blue baby” and wasn’t excepted to live through the night, according to his life sketch that was shared with EastIdahoNews.com.
The Idaho Falls Post Register reported Hudson was born with a narrow heart valve, which prevented normal flow of blood to the lungs. However, Berggren said she was always told he had a hole in his heart.
“As limited as he was — and I’m not a doctor — he had severe problems, whatever they were,” Berggren mentioned.
Hudson proved the doctors wrong, and he lived. But as a young child, Hudson couldn’t run and play like the other children his age because of his condition.
“He couldn’t overexert because he didn’t have enough oxygen, and he’d more or less pass out,” Berggren explained.
She said despite his health complications, he never complained about it. He simply accepted it.
“He was always my hero,” Berggren stated. “Kids say Batman or Superman or the president is (their) hero. Well, my brother was my hero.”
Hudson undergoes heart surgery
Hudson progressively got weaker as he grew older. On Oct. 20, 1953, at the age of 11, Hudson went in for a heart operation in Salt Lake City. Berggren pointed out that his surgery happened before the heart-lung machine was used.
“(Doctors) didn’t give him very much of a chance,” Berggren explained. “They told dad and mom without the surgery, he was going to die. With the surgery, the chances didn’t look good for him living, but it was the only chance he had.”
The Post Register reported that during Hudson’s surgery, “His heart not only stopped beating but several times went into a disordered type of movement, known as ventricular fibrillation which usually is fatal.”
A total of 21 electrical shocks were applied to his heart over a period of 28 minutes before it started beating normal again.
“He may have set a record for the length of time he was kept from dropping into death only by the skill of a surgeon’s trained hands and modern equipment,” the Post Register wrote.
Thanks to the “untiring massaging hand of the surgeon and the widened heart valve” doctors said Hudson “may now look forward to a near-normal life.”
Life after surgery
Berggren remembers when her brother came home from the hospital after the surgery. She said he was “very delicate” and couldn’t see well because his eyesight had been affected from his heart stopping.
He didn’t go to school that year due to the long road of recovery ahead of him.
“Gradually (his eyesight) got better,” Berggren explained. “(But) they couldn’t correct it any better than what they did because it was brain damage.”
Hudson — whose eyesight eventually improved enough that he could drive — had three heart surgeries during his life.
More miraculous events
Hudson’s stories of surviving the night as a newborn with complications, and later living through an intense heart operation where his heart stopped beating aren’t the only miraculous events from his life.
Sometime during his teenage years, Hudson was sitting on the back seat of the passenger side of a truck. Berggren doesn’t remember who was at fault but someone ran a stop sign. The car Hudson was in was t-boned, and the vehicle hit where Hudson was sitting.
This was one of several car accidents Hudson (who wasn’t driving) was involved in during his life.
“I remember going up the elevator (at the hospital) to see him, and one of my other relatives had come down and said, ‘Oh, he’s doing fine,'” Berggren recalls. “Well, when I got up there — I think they call it ‘code blue’ — everyone was in there working on him. They found out then he was allergic to penicillin. That just about took him out.”
Hudson recovered and in 1970, he married his wife Virginia and the couple had two kids. But over the years, his eyesight once again started to fail.
“His children were very young, and he had to stop driving. He now was legally blind,” his life sketch reads. “He became the man who rode his bike all over town. Extremely hot weather, soaking wet weather, frost on his beard, frozen icy sidewalks — he did it all.”
One day, Hudson stopped to check on his mom and dad when a car hit him while he was on his bike in Idaho Falls. His leg was broken in the accident.
“He never said, ‘Why me?'” Berggren pointed out. “(At one point) I told him, ‘Somebody is out there to get you.’
‘Well, I got it all worked out,” he answered. “Me and the Big Guy upstairs, we’ve decided that I’m not ready yet.'”
A life full of gratitude
Berggren said Hudson had four friends who he referred to as his “drinking buddies.” One by one they passed away. Hudson outlived them all.
“Nobody could believe that he lived as long as he did and lived a life that he did,” she said.
In the last few years of Hudson’s life, he had bone spurs — which are bony growths that form along bone edges — on his spine, making his legs weak.
“As he got older, different complications started up, and the doctors took care of that. Then he had these last ones that came up, and the heart doctor said his heart won’t take another surgery, so he couldn’t have the bone spurs removed,” she said. “I think a valve was leaking, and they couldn’t do anything with that because the doctors felt he wouldn’t live through it.”
Despite his challenges, Hudson lived his life with gratitude and touched other people’s lives along the way.
“He lived a long, good life and was an inspiration to a lot of people,” Berggren said. “He was so good-natured and the typical ‘Give me a lemon and I’ll make a lemon pie.’ He wasn’t going to sit and feel sorry for himself. He never did.”