Earlier this month, East Wareham resident Tom Cifello returned home from a quick trip to 7-Eleven to find his wife face down on the kitchen floor. She wasn't breathing.

“I yelled ‘Patty!' and I held her head," Tom recalled. "I quickly determined she wasn’t breathing and had no pulse."

Later they would discover that Patty had suffered a cardiac arrhythmia.

Tom performed CPR on his wife while their 15-year-old son called 911.

"Within a minute, the police were here and they just took over," Tom said. “An officer came in with a defibrillator and that’s what saved her. … After several attempts, they got a pulse, and she was out of here.”

Wareham Police officers Paul Somers and Michael Phinney responded with the defibrillator that finally got Patty's heart beating.

Last week, Tom brought his wife home.

“We’re living a miracle," he said. "I’m still in shock."

Tom credits the quick actions of police and Wareham EMS workers for saving Patty’s life.

“Those guys are heroes," he said.

Patty was transported to Tobey Hospital, where Tom was in a position he couldn’t have anticipated earlier that night. After almost 25 years of marriage and raising three sons together, Tom was faced with a heartbreaking possibility.

“They ask tough questions like ‘do you want to resuscitate,’” he recalled.

After about an hour, Patty was transferred to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she lay in a coma.

Relentlessly optimistic, Tom brought an outfit for her to leave the hospital in.

Tom took his 15-year-old son Jeffrey to Boston with him to find out what the prognosis was. Tom says he didn’t say much but, “when the doctor asked ‘do you have any questions,' my 15-year-old pulls out his notes.”

Patty has been battling breast cancer for three years, but this sudden malady was a shock.

“They’re painfully honest with you," Tom said of the doctors. "They said there’s a chance she won’t wake up.”

After 36 hours, Patty opened her eyes and Tom asked, “Can you blink for me?”

Patty blinked back. Before long, she was talking and playing word games with the nurses.

“When she came out of the coma, I said, ‘we got married for better or for worse. We’re going to get through this,'" Tom recalled.

As Patty recovers from the frightening event, the love of her family, along with the kindness and generosity of her neighbors, are helping her get back to health.

Tom has been known to make pizzas for his Indian Mound Beach neighbors in his hand-built stone pizza oven, and now those same neighbors are returning the favor, flooding the family with home-cooked meals.

“We have incredible neighbors," Tom Cifello said. "I got a freezer filled with lasagna and homemade mac and cheese.”

Tom knows that can be easy to slip in to a dark place when facing the loss of someone you love, but he says that even in difficult times, one always has a choice: “You might as well choose the happy path.”