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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.

By Elizabeth Cohen
CNN Medical Senior Correspondent

Dr. Kenneth Rosenfield, an interventional cardiologist at Massachusettts General Hospital, once had a patient whose life was saved because the man had a quick-thinking wife who knew the rhythm to the song “Staying Alive,”

The couple were taking a walk in the woods last year when he, like Michael Jackson, suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed. The man’s wife called 911, and then performed CPR on her husband for 15 minutes until the ambulance arrived.

“She saved his life, and when I asked her how she knew how to do CPR, she said she’d heard a one-minute spot on the radio from the American Heart Association that said to push very hard, 100 times per minute, to the tune of “Staying Alive,” Rosenfield says.

Getting CPR within minutes is crucial for someone who’s suffered from cardiac arrest, as brain death and permanent death start to occur just four to six minutes after the heart stops. More than 95 percent of cardiac arrest victims die before reaching the hospital, according to the AHA.

If more people knew CPR, many of these lives could have been saved, Rosenfield says. “I’ve had four or five patients saved by bystanders in the past year. It’s remarkable.”

Some of these lifesavers – like a high school senior who performed CPR on a man who’d collapsed in a clothing store – were trained in CPR. Others, like the woman who saved her husband, had no training but had heard the basics.

CPR is much easier than people think, Rosenfield says. “You should take a class, but it’s easier than it used to be. There’s no mouth to mouth. You push on the chest very hard and don’t worry about breaking a rib.”