First Aid Corps

The events of May 31 at the Cardinal Fitness on U.S. 30 in New Lenox are still fresh for Suthowski, who said he saw the man fall down after he and Dennis Siears were talking to him.

Denns Siears, Dennis Suthowski & Sherri Graf the Saviours

“We were joking around [and] he just rolled off his treadmill; it took us about 30 seconds to realize what was happening,” Suthowski said.

A salesmen and a resident of New Lenox, Suthowski had previously taken a class in emergency medical treatment.

“I thought I’d be an paramedic, but the cut off age is 35. I never thought it’d come it handy,” Suthowski said.

Graf, a preschool teacher from Frankfort, also had EMT training and was able to assist by compressing the man’s chest to keep his blood flowing.

“When I came up he was as blue as blue can be,” Graf said. “The instructions were in my head on how to do the chest compression, so I just reacted.”

According to Siears, a Frankfort resident, Cardinal Fitness Manager Hans Schultz retrieved an automated external defibrillator.

“I went to call the ambulance and then Suthowski was on the respirator and I was on the defibrillator,” Siears said.

“Slowly he was starting to breathe,” Graf said. “It happened in about five or six minutes, but it felt much longer.”

Through it happened in a span a minutes, Suthowski, Siears, Schultz and Graf gave a man back the rest of his life.

“It’s acts of heroism like this that mean the difference between life and death,” New Lenox Fire Chief Jeff Swanson said.

During standard team running drills, on a cool, overcast day, the perfectly healthy teenager collapsed.

Ted Okerstrom the Survivor

“Just remember waking up in the hospital a couple days later,” says 16-year-old wide receiver Ted Okerstrom of the Wayzata High School football team.

What happened in between is teamwork that ultimately saved Ted’s life.

After he collapsed, it didn’t take long to realize that Ted was in cardiac arrest. He wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.

“Teddy went down,” Coach Matt Lombardi said. “He just fell, he was down. I went and saw him, and about in 3 seconds I looked down at Teddy and he went from quick breaths to no breaths.”

“Eyes rolled back in the head. Just totally lifeless,” says Dee Schrader, the school’s athletic administrative assistant who is EMT-trained and does CPR training at the school.

Within moments, Coach Matt Lombardi was performing CPR.

Lombardi sent word to the school’s athletic office. Dee Schrader is the secretary, but she’s also an EMT. She grabbed one of the school’s AEDs — automated external defibrillators — and hustled to the field. She handed it off to one of the boys.

“‘Take this AED and get it down to R.J. and the student who’s down.’ He grabbed it and ran, and you probably have heard, little did I know, I handed it to the fastest runner at Wayzata High School,” said Schrader.

“That was about a two three minute period that I will never forget…it was a fight,” says Coach Lombardi.

“‘We’re going to make it, we got people coming, let’s go, let’s keep fighting, let’s keep fighting,’ Just very much coaching-type stuff,” recalled Lombardi.

“I got the AED opened up and on him,” assistant football coach Ryan “R.J.” Johnson said. “And basically once we turned that AED on, we listened to that and let it run the show.”

“(It) told us when we needed to shock, which we did, and it worked perfectly,” recalled Schrader.

“I know people around here are very humbled that it could have been a lot worse, but it turned out very good,” says coach R.J.

“I put that breath in and I felt that pulse. It was ‘he’s got a pulse. Oh my gosh,’ ” says Dee Schrader recalling the events on the field last week.

Ted has no family history of heart problems. For now, his sudden cardiac arrest is a mystery. Doctors implanted a defibrillator in his chest.

“It’s a parent’s worst nightmare to get this type of a phone call. We’re just really blessed and thankful that it turned out this way. That we have our son…he’s our Teddy,” says Ted’s father Norm Okerstrom.

Just thank you. Thank you for the coaches and see you out on the field,” says Ted. “Want to stay involved in Wayzata football because it is a big part of my life.”

Robert Cinque, 65, was on the 7:39 a.m. train from Penn Station when he had a heart attack.

Train Cops and Staff the Saviours

“I was really nervous,” said Robert Dibernardo, a train crew member who responded to the call for medical assistance that was put over the air and saw the passenger convulsing.

MTA police officers and several LIRR employees also responded to the call of a man going into cardiac arrest.

Cinque was placed on the floor where CPR was performed. When there was no response, one shock was given using an Automated External Defibrillator. Rescuers resumed CPR and when Cinque did not respond, a second shock of the defibrillator revived him.

In the five to six minutes in which it took to resuscitate Cinque, rescuers began to worry.

“I thought he was gone,” said Dibernardo. “I thought he had no chance.”

When Cinque was stabilized and his family notified, EMS workers transported him to Saint Vincent’s hospital in Manhattan where he is in stable condition.

On Dec. 20, Vitale was outside his New Providence home talking to a neighbor, watching his two young children play in the snow, when the otherwise healthy, then 43-year-old’s heart stopped working.

Tom Vitale the Survivor

His Kendrick Road neighbor called 911 and grabbed her husband, who started performing CPR on Vitale.

The New Providence police arrived within minutes, carrying an automated external defibrillator, which administers an electric shock, in an attempt to jolt the heart back to life.

“I was blue. I had no pulse or anything,” recalled Vitale, who said he doesn’t remember anything from the late December day, but pieced together the incident through his wife and neighbors. “I essentially died on that Saturday — or at least somebody unplugged me.”

After the defibrillator restored a weak rhythm, medics transported Vitale to Overlook Hospital.

Vitale awoke several days later. “The first big memory I have is waking up literally on Christmas Day and hearing the Today Show saying ‘Merry Christmas’” said Vitale.

A week later, Vitale walked out of the hospital without complications. He returned to work as a management consultant more than a month ago. And on Monday, he joined Schwartz, and other doctors instrumental in his care, on the golf course.

The game benefited the Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute at Overlook Hospital — one of the facilities instrumental in saving Vitale’s life.

A 38-YEAR-OLD man whose heart stopped is alive and in hospital, thanks to a built-in defibrillator in the Madrid shopping centre he was visiting.

A security guard in La Vaguada mall in the city’s Pilar district says he was automatically alerted when the man attempted to use the machine.

He then rushed to his aid and applied the defibrillator, which sends electric shocks through the heart to re-start it.

Public buildings all over Spain began to install defibrillators at the end of 2007 after the sudden death of Sevilla footballer Antonio Puerta from a cardiac arrest.