We will be reporting on lives saved around the world since our first documented life saved here in Singapore.
In the gym later that morning, Ron Pardi, a gym and music teacher at the school, led the first-graders in a ball-bouncing exercise.
When 6-year-old Olivia Quigley suddenly dropped to the floor, Pardi went to her and found her still breathing. He went to the office to call for help and sent another student to fetch Casaletto from his sixth-grade classroom nearby.
Teacher Robert Casaletto, 38, rushed to the gym fearing something had happened to his daughter, also a first-grader in the class. He went to help Olivia as the other first-graders watched in stunned silence. One began to cry. Then, he sent them into another room.
“That was the hard thing for me,” Casaletto said. “Part of me wanted to go hug my daughter, but I thought, Olivia needs me more.”
Carabine rushed in minutes later. She saw Olivia on the floor, her skin gray. Carabine knew the girl well, having met her at a summer camp last year where she was teaching.
“She took a couple of breaths and just stopped,” Carabine said. “I just looked at Bobby in disbelief. It’s not something you ever want to see.”
Carabine put her mouth over Olivia’s and gave her two breaths. Casaletto gave her 30 chest compressions. The two alternated the routine for 7 minutes.
Firefighters and emergency workers arrived shortly afterward and shocked the girl with a defibrillator as a school administrator watched and said a Hail Mary aloud.
Olivia’s heartbeat returned.
Joe Quigley arrived at the school just in time to see his daughter’s breathing restored. He pulled out his cellphone and called his wife, a scientist at Biogen Idec Inc. in Cambridge.
“When we got to the ER at Mass. General, they said they believed she had a heart attack,” she said. “It was absolutely inconceivable to me. I still have a hard time accepting this happened.”
“MGH called her their miracle child,” Joe Quigley said sitting in his daughter’s hospital room yesterday.
Yesterday afternoon in her hospital room, Olivia behaved like a typical little girl, coloring pictures and singing songs. She greeted Casaletto and Carabine, as well as her first-grade teacher, Lauren Rozzi, with open arms. They gave her gifts, stuffed animals and notes, from her first-grade classmates. She wiggled two of her loose teeth for them.
“There are no words to express my gratitude,” Cathy Quigley said. “Olivia had angels on earth taking care of her.”
Updates
Today Boston EMT Philip Kennard returned to the same auditorium for a celebration of the rescue of Olivia Quigley, now 7. She was in the front row with her parents, smiling, as officials praised the school’s teachers and rescue personnel for bringing her back to life.
“Right there,” said Kennard, 25, pointing to the spot on the floor where he and his partner Michael Steiner, 49, treated Olivia that day.
“It’s amazing. It’s one of those things that can happen only once in an entire career,” said Kennard, a tall, thin, young man in the brown uniform of an EMT. “She’s made a full recovery, a happy little kid.”
“After one shock, she not only got a heartbeat back, but she started breathing simultaneously as well,” said Steiner, who said the teachers’ CPR efforts were key in allowing the defibrillation to work.
About 200 students from the school, from grades 1 to 7, the girls clad in plaid jumpers and the boys in white polo shirts and dark pants, crowded into the auditorium for the ceremony, which included a presentation of proclamations from the Legislature and from the city.
Principal Mary Ann Manfredonia said Olivia’s family was truly “a profile in courage” and that Olivia had “battled the odds and is well on her way to a complete recovery.”
Joe Quigley, Olivia’s father, said the ceremony was “fabulous.”
“It gave us such an opportunity to stand up and actually thank, in person, everybody that was involved, the teachers, the school, Father Wayne from the church, and, of course, the EMTs that responded so well,” said Quigley.
“Olivia’s doing great. She’s just so happy to be back in school. She’s so happy to be back with her friends. She wants to be a normal little girl. And she is a normal little girl, she’s just been through an awful lot,” said Quigley. It’s still a mystery why Olivia’s heart stopped, Quigley said.
Asked after the ceremony how she was feeling, Olivia said, “Better,” with a big smile.
Quigley said it took seven minutes for emergency responders to get to the school. That was “absolutely fantastic,” he said, but “in our daughter’s case, if CPR hadn’t been performed on her, seven minutes would have been too late.”
