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EMS House of DeFrance http://www.emshouse.com Peripheral Med Courtesy the EMS House of DeFrance http://www.defrance.org Bill Bondar knows exactly where he died: on the sidewalk outside his house in a retirement community in southern New Jersey. It was 10:30 on the night of May 23, a Wednesday, and Bondar was 61—a retired computer programmer with a cherry red Gibson bass guitar, an instrument he had first picked up around the same time as Chuck Berry. He was 6 feet 1 and 208 pounds, down about 50 pounds over the last several years. On that night he had driven home from a jam session with two friends and, as he was unloading his car, his heart stopped. That is the definition of "clinical death," one of several definitions doctors use, not always with precision. He wasn't yet "brain dead," implying a permanent cessation of cerebral function, or "legally dead," i.e., fit to be buried. But he was dead enough to terrify his wife, Monica, who found him moments later, unconscious, not breathing, with no pulse. His eyes were open, but glassy—"like marbles," Monica says, "with no life in them. They were the eyes of a dead man." The
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