‘I Was Dead’: Denver Judge David Blackett Recounts The Night He Was Stabbed In Heart- But Survived
– David Blackett just planned to putter around in his garage the night of August 18, 2019. It didn’t go as planned. He was soon lying in a pool of his own blood recognizing he would soon be dead.
“There were so many things that had to go right for me to make it,” recalled Blackett, who was a magistrate in the Adams County court system at the time of the attack , but was appointed to be a Denver County Court Judge in 2021. “I realized I must have been stabbed. I see my T-shirt pulsing with my heartbeat, so I’m in bad shape now.”“I knew I was in bad shape. It felt like my life force was leaving me,” said Blackett.
Surgery on Blackett began before he ever made it into an operating room. Denver Health trauma surgeon Rex Lawless began cutting Blackett’s chest open even as the patient was being wheeled in. “I couldn’t speak, couldn’t feel my hands or feet but definitely felt that surgery. I could feel once they started cutting- I can’t describe the intensity of the pain. There was no anesthesia, no pain relief, nothing. It felt like I was having an autopsy done while still alive,” said Blackett.
Lawless said after cutting open Blackett’s chest, “I immediately see a hole in his heart so I held his heart in my hand and put my thumb over the hole.”“I sewed around my thumb to close the hole in the heart,” said Lawless.
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