Berklyn Medical Solutions

Athlete had no family history of heart disease, collapsed during practice.

By Janice Youngwith
The Chicago Daily Herald

CHICAGO — Like most college athletes, 21-year-old Liz Pearlman, an Aurora University junior and women’s basketball center, worrying about cardiac arrest is something that never crossed her radar.

“There’s no family history of heart disease,” says the six-foot Chicago native who had just completed her first day of practice on Oct. 15 when the unthinkable happened.

“I remember running sideline sprints during the last 15 minutes of practice and feeling extremely tired,” Pearlman recalls. “I didn’t feel ill, just extremely tired and I sat down. That’s all I remember.”

Head athletic trainer Terry Smith walked over to see what was wrong. “Initially I thought she may have a cramp,” Smith says. “It was a two-hour practice and she looked great. There were no signs of a pending heart problem.”

It took Smith about 10 seconds to walk across the court to reach Pearlman’s side.

“From that point on everything moved very quickly,” Smith says. “Liz began hyperventilating, was having trouble breathing and it spiraled out of control. I began CPR as her heart stopped.”

Smith yelled for an assistant coach to call 911 and for Coach Michelle Roof to grab the automated external defibrillator (AED) hanging on the wall in the hallway just outside the Thornton Gymnasium. Roof, who has served as head basketball coach for five years and led the team to a 61-45 overall record, sprinted back with the device and took over compressions as Smith opened the AED and placed the pads.

An AED is a computerized medical device that can check a person’s heart rhythm, recognize a rhythm that requires a shock and advise rescuers when a shock is needed.

The AED delivered two shocks before Pearlman’s heart resumed beating.

“We cleared the gym, paramedics arrived and Liz was taken to an ambulance, which remained in our parking lot for nearly 20 minutes as paramedics worked to stabilize her for transport to Provena Mercy Medical Center,” Roof says. “I’ve never seen anything like this before and initially my mind was in a tailspin. However, CPR training kicked in and I’m so thankful we were prepared to react.”

Smith, who has been teaching CPR for 20 years and AED training for 10 years, says reacting in the moment can be different from in the classroom.

“In real time, things happen quickly, but in emotional time it seems to take longer,” says Smith, who last year put his CPR training to use at a baseball game when a spectator collapsed.

“While I’ve been trained to use an AED, I’ve never had to actually use it,” says Smith, who calls it one of the greatest inventions ever. “As I tell my classes, you learn it and it seems monotonous, but there’s a reason for it.”

With five AEDs strategically placed on the small 4,300-student campus and all coaches certified in both CPR and AED usage according to NCAA guidelines, Smith says training is the key.

Campus security officers, school nurses, student athletic trainers and hundreds of education and nursing majors all complete required first aid, CPR and AED training, says Smith, who adds that Pearlman was in the “right place at the right time.”

Returning to the court for a special celebration of life just 10 days later, Pearlman calls Smith and Roof’s response “a gift from God, a blessing and a miracle.”

While sidelined this season, Pearlman is wearing a special defibrillator vest and awaiting medical tests to help determine treatment for the nature of blood clots in her lungs that weren’t diagnosed until two days later in the hospital.

“It’s truly a second chance at life,” says Pearlman, who says she plans to get the word out on the importance of defibrillators and having people trained to recognize a cardiac emergency and to use them.

According to the American Heart Association, the national cardiac arrest survival rate is a dismal five percent and many Americans simply aren’t prepared to perform CPR or respond to another emergency.

Each year more than 335,000 people across the country die from coronary heart disease before reaching a hospital or an emergency room. Most of those deaths result from sudden cardiac arrest. When the arrest occurs outside the hospital setting, most victims die because CPR and defibrillation were not provided soon enough.

According to the American Heart Association, which since 1963 has annually trained 11 million potential responders, the vast majority of people in the United States do not know CPR. In most cases, they say, when sudden cardiac arrest occurs, a victim’s heart quivers in uncontrolled rhythm and causes the person to collapse, become unresponsive or experience gentle shaking and stop breathing normally. Death typically follows within minutes, with some 1,000 American deaths each day attributed to sudden cardiac arrest.

Memphis firefighter Kenneth Richmond found himself on the flip side of lifesaving last week.

Although his memory of the day is blurred, Richmond went to Bon Lin Middle School on Aug. 18 to check out his kids for an orthodontist appointment.

Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal

Kenneth Richmond is alive and at home his wife, Serbrina, after suffering a heart attack at Bon Lin Middle School last week.

Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal

Dawn Graves, a cardiac nurse at Methodist North Hospital, and Jeremy Yow, assistant principal at Bon Lin Middle School, performed CPR on Kenneth Richmond after he collapsed at the school.

He was chatting with the front office staff at about 3 p.m. and had written his first name on the sign-out sheet when the 41-year-old father collapsed in cardiac arrest.

With ink pen still in hand, Richmond slammed onto the tile floor, landing on his back, unconscious.

What happened next has been described by those who were there as the result of divine intervention.

“I like saying that the Lord put everything in place for me to still be here,” Richmond said Monday, recovering in his Arlington home.

Also in the office that afternoon was cardiac nurse Dawn Graves, who was there to check out her son for a medical appointment. If she hadn’t sent him back to his classroom to get his backpack that he forgot, they would have been gone when Richmond collapsed.

“I just heard him hit the floor,” said Graves, a nurse at Methodist North Hospital.

She quickly dropped to his side and rubbed his chest and patted his face. His eyes were open and he was breathing, but he was out of it. He was sweating heavily.

She started performing CPR as an office staff member called 911. Assistant principal Jeremy Yow, also trained in CPR, quickly grabbed the defibrillator the school received last year. (As of July 2008, all Shelby County Schools have defibrillators.)

They calmly followed the instructions on the device, alternating between electrical shocks through pads on Richmond’s chest and CPR.

Bartlett Fire paramedics arrived within three minutes and gave Richmond additional shocks on the way to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis. He was released Friday, with a monitored pacemaker in his chest.

Richmond said he’d been to a heart doctor recently because he was having irregular heartbeats and was scheduled to see a rhythm specialist two days after he collapsed.

He praises everyone who helped him and encourages all businesses and organizations to have Automated External Defibrillators.

“If they didn’t have the AED to shock me, I probably wouldn’t be here,” Richmond said.

Shelby schools received defibrillators through donations from local municipalities and Kiwanis clubs. They cost about $1,800 each.

Principal Russell Dyer said thinking about the “what ifs” from that day is “scary,” but it was amazing to witness.

Serbrina Richmond, the firefighter’s wife, said she’s grateful that she made that orthodontist appointment for her kids, who usually ride the bus home from school.

Had she not, daughter Kennedy, 13, and son Kenny, 11, would’ve likely found their father passed out.

“It was like angels watching over my husband,” she said. “He is a living miracle.”

Heart statistics

It’s estimated that about 95 percent of sudden cardiac arrest victims die before reaching the hospital.

Survival is directly linked to the amount of time between the onset of sudden cardiac arrest and defibrillation. If no bystander CPR is provided, a victim’s chances of survival are reduced by seven to 10 percent with every minute of delay until defibrillation.

Source: American Heart Association

By: Sherri Drake Silence, Memphis Commercial Appeal

Through a collaboration between city hospital services and the city’s taxi fleet, more than 100 taxis in Stockholm, Sweden, will be equipped with automated external defibrillators (AEDs) so they can be dispatched to assist victims of sudden cardiac arrest. With taxis throughout the city, in many cases one will be able to reach the location of an emergency more quickly than an ambulance that has to be dispatched from a centralized station.

“Every minute that passes reduces the chance of survival without any lasting injury by 10 percent,” the head of a Stockholm emergency rescue service told the press.

Taxi drivers have been trained to use the AEDs. “It’s incredibly easy,” was the way one of them described it. “You just lift the lid, push the on-off button, and it starts giving you instructions.”

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., July 10 (UPI)

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation soon could be taught using the Nintendo Wii video game console, students at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, said.

The American Heart Association has pledged $50,000 to fund the work by biomedical engineering students, the university said in a release Thursday.

Greg Walcott, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, devised the idea of a computer program that could be downloaded on home computers and synched with the wireless technology of the Wii remote to teach users proper resuscitation technique.

The students plan to make the program available, free of charge, on the American Heart Association Web site as early as this fall.

“The Heart Association’s high interest in our students’ innovations points to potential of this project and how it fits in with its desire to deliver reliable CPR education to the masses,” faculty adviser Jack Rogers said.