Family thankful of Christmas miracle on Ben Franklin Bridge
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A Philadelphia version of the Christmas Miracle, this one started on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. One South Jersey family has a lot to celebrate this holiday season, thanks to the kindness of one very special stranger.
The family's last name is Stahl, but we're not related.
"We've literally done it hundreds of times in the last 35 years," Ed Stahl said.
Ed and Shelly Stahl love walking across the Ben Franklin Bridge, but on Nov.13, Ed fell to the ground in full cardiac arrest.
"I remember at one point after we had passed the top of the bridge getting a little bit dizzy," Ed Stahl said.
"I was thinking, I told my friend 'this is not good he's going,' I kept calling his name, 'Ed come back to me,'" Shelly Stahl said.
This is when fate intervenes.
Marc Denlinger, riding his bike across the bridge, stops.
"I said, 'hi I'm an ICU nurse I can help,'" Denlinger said. "He is blue, his eyes are rolled back in his head, I'm thinking this guy is dead."
With chest compressions and an AED shock to his heart, Ed regains consciousness and eventually ends up at Jefferson Hospital where he's scheduled for heart bypass surgery.
Here's where fate reunites the strangers again.
"I was like you gotta be kidding me, this is Ed from the bridge," Denlinger said.
Marc is a perfusion student at Jefferson randomly assigned to Ed's surgery.
"He says to us you know I'm the guy that kept your heart going on the bridge. But what you don't know is I'm the guy who turned it off so we could fix it," Ed Stahl said. "This person that I didn't know all of the sudden becomes one of the most important people in my life, twice in one week."
A month later, with Ed now recovered, he's reunited with Marc.
The 68-year-old retired principal from Marlton thinks this is more than a coincidence.
"I still say man you didn't have to get off the bike," Ed Stahl said.
"I said there was no other option," Denlinger said.
"He not only restored my life, he restored my faith in humanity," Ed Stahl said.
Now Shelly and Ed are getting ready to celebrate a very special Christmas.
"That we're all together and Ed is here and we get to have a second chance," Shelly Stahl said. "It's going to be more wonderful than it has ever been."
"When we sit down to watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' this year it will be very special to see a movie about an angel that saves a man's life on a bridge," Ed Stahl said.
Ed says his angel on the Ben Franklin Bridge was Marc, who's given him the Christmas miracle of surviving.