A coffee with… Richard Guay | the resurrected

Sometimes death strikes, sneakily. Sometimes it’s rather life that takes over, without us knowing why. Richard Guay recently experienced these two situations… simultaneously.

Francis Vailles
The Press

On February 15, in the afternoon, the ex-CEO of the Caisse de dépôt enters the Costco on rue Bridge, in Montreal. He had spent the morning at UQAM with his Masters in Finance students.

In the row of breads, he suddenly feels unwell and collapses. “I woke up a week later in the hospital,” he tells me at Le Muscadin restaurant in Old Montreal.

What he didn’t know then was that his heart stopped beating for more than 10 minutes at Costco. He remembers absolutely nothing, it was the doctors and his wife who reconstructed the sequence, although they were not present.

That afternoon, Maxime Thauvette, one of the Costco managers, is informed by an employee that a customer is unconscious, bakery section. Maxime is advised, because he took his course in first aid in the workplace, explains the Costco employee on the phone.

Arrived in the row, he finds that the man has visibly bumped into falling, given the presence of blood. Finding no pulse, he quickly undertook cardiac massage. He then installs a defibrillator on the chest, which Costco must keep on site at all times.

The device does not detect more pulses and, for some unknown reason, “we are not able to deliver the shock [électrique] with the defibrillator,” he told me.

However, the device gives instructions to continue the massage. A client comes to her aid, practicing artificial respiration.

It was finally the paramedics, who rushed to the scene, who managed to restart Richard Guay’s heart, after five shocks from their defibrillator and an injection of adrenaline.

Did the cardiopulmonary resuscitation last 10 minutes, as stated in the hospital report? Maxime Thauvette estimates that he took care of the man for half an hour before the paramedics arrived.

” Ten minutes ? I didn’t have a watch, but I feel like it was much longer than that,” he told me.

Anyway, the intervention of the Costco employee saved Richard Guay’s life, if not spared him serious consequences, since the cardiac massage made it possible to supply oxygen to the vital organs and the brain. .

“I was really dead,” Richard Guay told me, laughing. The surgeon explained to me that if the Costco kid had waited 20 minutes, it was over. »

Nothing predisposed Richard Guay to this tragic event. The 61-year-old fund manager does not smoke, is not overweight, has no family history of cardiac arrhythmia, drinks lightly and plays several sports. The day before the event, he had even played his two weekly hours of tennis.

After resuscitation, paramedics transport Richard Guay to the Center hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal. He has an erratic pulse and very high blood pressure. He is artificially put into a coma, from which he emerges a week later, miraculously safe and sound.

This is followed by a cocktail of drugs, the insertion of a pacemaker (pacemaker) under the skin and a demanding rehabilitation, which he carried out mainly at home, two weeks later, with the help of his spouse. He then struggled to walk.

And guess what? Richard Guay resumed his normal activities on May 9, less than three months after the cardiac arrest. He even played tennis three days before we met at the restaurant on May 26! A risen, in short!

“In tennis, it’s in the second hour that I have more difficulty. It’s my thighs, I don’t have the spring I had before,” he told me. According to his doctors, the pacemaker would reduce the risk of such an event happening again to zero.

The cause of the cardiac arrest? After several tests, the doctors know practically nothing about it. A genetic cause was suspected, but the hypothesis was recently ruled out.

“I don’t worry too much. I’m not in a wheelchair,” he told me.

Richard Guay judges that he lived, in a way, a second “Black Swan”, after that of 2008. The expression designates an unforeseeable event, in particular on the stock markets, which has a colossal impact.

In the fall of 2008, Richard Guay was the new CEO of the Caisse de depot, after the departure of Henri-Paul Rousseau, when the worst financial crisis in history occurred.

At the end of November 2008, the financial hurricane forced him to take leave of his duties due to overwork. Lack of sleep and stress prevented him from reacting adequately with his assistants, he explains to me.

It was Caisse real estate expert Fernand Perreault who replaced him on an interim basis, in the midst of a storm. The year 2008 ended with a loss of nearly $40 billion for the Caisse (-25%), by far the worst in its history.

Richard Guay will no longer lead the institution thereafter, being replaced by Michael Sabia on March 13, 2009. He advises the Caisse until 2010, then becomes a professor at UQAM.

Is he afraid of dying now? ” Nope. Living with the fear of dying would limit me from enjoying life. What happened changes the outlook for life. I want to spend more quality time with my wife, my friends, my kids,” he says.

On May 9, Richard Guay also announced to the management of UQAM that he was taking gradual retirement. He will fall half-time next September.

What do I get out of it? No one is safe. And since his wife, Nathalie Francisci, told me the news in March, I keep a number on the back of my cell phone to call in case of emergency, on his advice.