By David Saltonstall

In life, Flavia Fioretti and Flavia Golden rarely cross paths with another Flavia in New York City, but it was a brush with death in the heart of Central Park last month that brought them together – leading today to an epic holiday tale of salvation and resurrection.

The two women – both doctors who live on the Upper West Side, one aged 42 and born in Rio de Janeiro, the other 59 and a child of the Lower East Side – were strangers to each other when an older man out for a jog fell face-down in Central Park along the 72nd Street Transverse as they passed nearby last Nov. 19th.

The situation could not have been more dire that crisp autumn morning: unconscious and bleeding from his fall, the man’s body made one last gasp for breath and his heart stopped. In that moment, he died.

Enter the Flavias.

Golden reached him first and, feeling no pulse, rolled him over onto his back and began CPR. Fioretti rushed to the man’s other side and in seconds the two established each other’s medical backgrounds, exchanged steely “let’s-do-this” looks, and began the task of delivering rib-bending compressions to keep the man’s blood flowing.

“He had no body movements, no pulse,” recalled Fioretti, a pediatrician whose mornings are more often filled with earaches and wellness checks.

Another passerby, Alexa Lopez, 29, called 911. Minutes ticked by with no sign of life from the man on the ground. A check for ID turned up none; he was anonymous. The Flavias worked in lockstep as a small crowd gathered, while somewhere in the distance the peals of an ambulance sounded.

“In the E.R., they would have applied the paddles right away to try and shock the heart back,” said Golden, an internist by training. “But our job was just to keep it going until help got there.”

Help came in the form of FDNY Lt. Robert Walsh, who rolled up with his crew and took command. Regular park visitors might know Walsh more by the wail of his bagpipes, which he famously practices on a rock outcrop in the Park near the 102nd Street Transverse, but this morning he was an on-duty paramedic.

Walsh has spent years rushing about Manhattan trying to resuscitate people. It rarely ends well, he says, as the passage of even a few minutes can make the difference between life and death, or permanent neurological damage.

“When we got him in the back (of the ambulance), they shocked him,” Walsh recalled. “But still his heart was not in a normal rhythm.”

###

Carney Mimms, aged 77, is sitting in his home on West 72nd Street and looking pretty good for a guy who was dead a couple weeks before. He has survived, but adds, “I should begin by explaining that I have essentially no memory of any of it,” said Mimms, which is not uncommon for cardiac victims.

Ruth, his partner, is more vivid about Mimm’s journey from Central Park face plant to full recovery.  “We think it should be a Hallmark movie, it’s so unbelievable.”

The miracles just stacked up that morning: The two Flavias, both trained professionals who happened to be walking by. The immediate commencement of CPR. The seamless hand-off to Walsh. Mimm’s own fitness, honed by regular jogs, bike rides, and gym workouts, which very likely gave his heart the back-up vessels needed to survive the three blocked arteries that would be found in his heart.

Mimms was delivered to Lenox Hill Hospital that morning, just an elderly man in jogging shorts with nothing but a NY Sports Club fob on him.

But Ruth knew in her bones that something was wrong when Mimms did not return home that morning. She began calling around, and eventually someone at Lenox Hill told her that the hospital had, in fact, admitted a no-name jogger from Central Park earlier that day.

It had to be him.

When she got to his bedside, Mimms was in critical condition. “He was on a respirator, he had a balloon-thing put in his aorta, and he had tubes all over the place,” Ruth said. A doctor later told her that in such cases, the survival rate hovers around 10 percent.

But the next day, Mimms woke up. And two days after that, he was sent home. “He was dead on a Tuesday, he went home on a Friday,” Golden said succinctly.

Lt. Walsh is very clear as to what made the difference for Mimms. “Bystander CPR,” he says, meaning the presence of people who are able to immediately administer CPR in the minutes before an ambulance can arrive.

Mimms thinks there might have been another level of intervention that day – from his late mother, Mary Armstrong Mimms, whose name his sister and brother-in-law had engraved on a Central Park bench after her passing five years ago, no more than 300 yards away from the spot he fell.

“Maybe she was hovering,” Mimms said, adding that his partner Ruth believes that “my mother heard that I was in distress and called out and they said, ‘We have two doctors here. Which one should we send?’ And she says, “Send them both!”

###

The most joyous holiday party in New York City took place on December 20th, at the home of Flavia Golden on the Upper West Side. The other Flavia was there, Flavia Fioretti, with her husband and young son, Eduardo. Mimms was there, as was his daughter, Rachel Mimms; his sister, Lea; his brother-in-law, Tom; and his partner, Ruth.

Lt. Walsh made the grandest entrance, bringing with him his bagpipes, which he proceeded to thrum to life and regale all with spirited renditions of “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” “America the Beautiful,” and “The Marine Corps Hymn.”

All of the main participants from that day have remained in touch to varying degrees, and they are convinced they will do so forever.

“It has just been extraordinary,” Ruth said. “You know, we will be friends forever. I think that is what happens when you save someone’s life and the family is aware of it. You don’t lose these people so soon.”

Mimms, who converted to Judaism when he was 65, spoke of the Jewish prayer that praises God who gives life to the dead. “In fact, I went back to my synagogue in Montclair (New Jersey) and offered the customary recitation given by one who has recovered from a life-threatening illness or traumatic event.”

“I was brought back to life,” he said. “And that has some meaning. And those Flavias – you can’t make that up!”

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.