First Aid Corps

Malinowski and friend Kayla Stonehouse had come back from a water break during a kick boxing class about 9:20 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Recreational Eagle Center to find abdominal exercises already had begun on the mat.

“Good thing we came back late,” Malinowski whispered jokingly to Stonehouse.

When the next exercise began, everyone flipped on their backs - except Malinowski.

Stonehouse again thought she was joking.

Then she noticed Malinowski’s face, eyes rolled back. She began to wheeze and gasp.

Stonehouse jumped up, yelling for help.

Sophomore Christiane Berdan was certified in CPR from her lifeguard days and as a UW-L athletic training student. She thought at first Malinowski had fainted but when she got closer realized it was much worse. The 20-year-old had no pulse and wasn’t breathing.

“You kick into autopilot and do what needs to be done at the moment and don’t think about it,” said Berdan.

Berdan started chest compressions, and Stonehouse began breathing for her friend.

Andrea Harrill, UW-L student and building manager at the center, was sitting at the back counter when a frantic person came from the fitness room. Harrill directed students and fellow staff to grab an on-site defibrillator and call 911.

Harrill administered shocks to Malinowski with the defibrillator until the La Crosse Fire Department and Tri-State Ambulance arrived.

Firefighter EMTs got Malinowski breathing on her own again, her father Mark Malinowski said.

His daughter is recovering at Franciscan Skemp Medical Center. Walking outside the hospital room, Mark Malinowski’s eyes teared up when he spoke of the many people who came through for his family and daughter - from UW-L staff to firefighters, first responders and hospital workers.

But she wouldn’t be alive had the students not known what to do, he said.

“They reacted. They weren’t afraid to do something,” he said. “These people are heroes in my book.”

“Talking to people and realizing more and more how bad it was when I was going to the hospital, realizing it really is a second chance at life,” Clare said.

“People I don’t even know and don’t remember and had no idea would do such things for me are showing all sorts of support. I can’t show thanks enough,” Clare said.

Faith Sendelweck would just like to get back to a normal routine.

She goes back to Jasper Middle School on Monday; however, this once high-energy soccer player is forced to take it a little easier from now on.

Sendelweck says she does not remember much of what happened one Sunday earlier this month.

“All I remember is diving for a ball and throwing it back,” Sendelweck said. “That’s pretty much it.”

She was playing soccer in the gym of Jasper High School.

Sendelweck’s dad was with her and he remembers seeing her collapse into a curtain hanging from the gym ceiling.

Dr. Dean Beckman just happened to be playing basketball with his son there, too, and immediately ran to help.

“(She was) becoming a little bit lethargic, sat down, became unconscious and then lost her pulse,” Dr. Beckman said. “We started CPR.”

Turns out, Sendelweck had a congenital heart condition that no one knew about.

“The rhythm is messed up,” Sendelweck said. “You have a short bump and then a big bump and then another short bump. My short bump drags on too long before my next heart beat and messes it up.”

Sendelweck might not be here had it not been for a defibrillator in the gym.

“You could tell she was starting to respond because her color came back, her lips turned pink and she was moaning,” Dr. Beckman said.

Sendelweck now has her own defibrillator, an IED, implanted in her chest.

Sendelweck is going to be a spokesperson for pediatric IED’s at Kosair’s Children’s Hospital.

In August of last year, Durham police officer Gerry Elliott was directing game traffic in front of the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

“I remember taking a step to walk out of the intersection and everything went white,” Elliott said.

He fell and a fellow officer caught him.

“He told me he rolled me over and when he rolled me over, my complexion was kind of grayish blue and my lips were dark blue,” Elliott recalled.

Elliott’s heart stopped beating.

An EMT grabbed an automatic external defibrillator (AED) from the park’s office, and shocked his heart back to life.

A quick response and the AED saved Elliott’s life.

“We call them idiot proof, I mean, they basically show you where to put the pads, you hit a button and step back and it tells you what to do next,” Elliott said.

“I used to believe in luck, but now I just believe that I’m really blessed. I really do,” he said.

McKee, 52, was at the airport Dec. 12 to meet his sister, who was flying in from Rochester, N.Y., for a holiday visit. McKee, who lives in Fredericksburg, is a sculptor and conservator of fine art and historic monuments, such as those along Monument Avenue.

He’d gone up the escalator into the atrium, near the security checkpoint for Concourse B, when he noticed the lights for Hudson News, a shop selling newspapers and magazines, snacks, and souvenirs.

“The lights went from white to red to black,” recalled McKee, who had no chest pains to foreshadow the heart attack he was having. “My last thought was, ‘I can’t handle this.’ I knew I was dropping.”

Business was slow at Hudson News, where Cagwin was working, and she had just mentioned to someone how boring Saturdays can be when she looked up from the sales counter to see McKee collapse.

She instinctively raced to McKee, maybe 20 yards away, and checked for breathing and a pulse. She found neither. He was, as Sheets would say later, “gone,” and the race was on not only to save him but to revive him before he suffered irreversible brain damage.

Cagwin opened the glass door to a defibrillator on the wall just above where McKee fell.

She had no training in using a defibrillator and knew cardiopulmonary resuscitation only from what she learned in high school gym class, but, she said, “I just knew I had to do something.”

She was joined by a woman on her way to catch a flight who said she worked in sports medicine, and the two of them followed the instructions on the defibrillator to apply the first shocks to McKee’s heart.

Another man stopped and began doing chest compressions. Several other passers-by stopped and helped.

Within a couple of minutes, several of the airport’s rescue workers — who happened to be downstairs and not in the firehouse a half-mile away because they were returning chairs and tables they had borrowed for a Christmas party — arrived and took over.

They shocked McKee’s heart three more times, continued to do vigorous chest compressions — McKee still has the sore ribs to prove it — and his pulse returned.

McKee, of course, remembers none of it. After blacking out, his next memory is of a shining white light, although it’s not what you might think. It was the dome light in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He was going to be OK.

Cagwin has been drifting from job to job since high school, looking for a purposeful career to do for the rest of her life. What she did for McKee that day gave her a glimpse of her future. She is looking to enter nursing school.

“I never thought I’d be able to react that way in a situation like that, but now I know I can do it,” she told McKee. “Thank you for giving my life direction.”

McKee has wondered why things seemed to fall in place for him, but he brushes aside any suggestion that it has anything to do with him.

“I don’t feel like there’s anything special about my case,” he said, “aside from the special people around me when I dropped.”

The 55-year-old male, who goes to the Brock University’s faculty of education campus in Hamilton, was at the Glenridge Avenue campus playing an intramural basketball game when he collapsed about 8:15 p.m.

People nearby rushed to the man’s aid and used one of the school’s automated external defibrillators to deliver an electric shock to restart the victim’s heart.

The man’s son and his girlfriend helped administer CPR until paramedics arrived.

Keith Folkard, 50, a insurance underwriter, who was sitting in the Jarrold stand, was taken ill just minutes after kick-off of the match against Brentford.

But two GPs and Simon Bowles, a cardiology specialist nurse from the N&N, were sitting nearby and rushed to his aid.

They carried out life support and used one of Carrow Road’s automated electronic defibrillators, before an ambulance crew took Mr Folkard to hospital.

Mr Folkard said: “I’m extremely grateful for what they did and for all the care I have received in hospital since. I feel very humbled.”

The patient’s brother, Brian, from Upper Stoke, near Poringland, was also at the game, and both are season ticketholders, although Keith now lives near Southend.

Brian said: “Without the help he received at the ground I think we would have been attending his funeral. I cannot fault those guys at all.”

He can’t recall the first man’s name, but Etobicoke hockey arena senior operator Art Jones said “he’s back playing hockey” and they regularly chat.

Art Jones the Saviour

“He just went down on the ice, but a couple of the guys are city workers and realized what was happening,” he said.

Doug Clancy, then manager of an arena at Erindale College, joined him doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but they feared “we were going to lose him.”

Jones, who trained on the defibrillator about one month earlier, fetched the portable unit and got the victim’s heart beating with one jolt before paramedics arrived.

“I was at the other end of the lobby with my partner, Marco, and I just said ‘call 911′ and we started running and I grabbed the defibrillator and in I went,” he said, noting the arena has two public access defibrillators on-site for such incidents.

When Jones arrived at the scene, he found a 52-year-old regular named Wally down on the ice - unconscious, but still breathing.

“When I got over to (Wally) I started pulling out the unit and got his shirt up just in case he went down and, sure enough, he started going blue and stopped breathing. I had to slap the pads on his chest and hit him with a jolt,” Jones recalled.

With just the one reviving jolt, Wally’s eyes fluttered, his heart restarted and he was breathing again, albeit with laboured breaths, Jones said.

Friends were preparing to do mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions Thursday, but Jones intervened. “He’s going to be okay,” he said.

Grateful at the recognition, especially from arena regulars, he stressed “it’s important for people to realize the units are there, and to get training. Seconds count. If you can save a life, that’s what it’s all about.”

Paul Chaisson, 52, of Halifax said he started to feel dizzy while skating across the ice a little after midnight on Jan. 20 at the Centennial Arena.

“I saw the lights were getting funny and I knew I was going down,” Chaisson said Monday. “So I braced myself for it, and that was it.”

A paramedic from the opposing team rushed to his side, as did his teammate, Dr. Kirk Magee, who happens to be an ER doctor.

“As I got closer, Ken said he wasn’t breathing,” Magee said. “So we turned him over, and we called for the defibrillator.”

The assistant manager rushed for the defibrillator that’s kept at the arena.

The arena manager gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, while the experts did CPR and used the defibrillator.

Within minutes, they had a pulse.

Coming to, Chaisson still had his mind on the game.

“My teammates were all hovered around me and I wanted to get up right away. And the first thing I said to them [was]: ‘Did they call the game?’”

Chaisson plans to sit out the rest of the season will still be on the sidelines.

“As soon as I’m released from hospital, I’ll go back to the rink,” he said. And he doesn’t plan to stay away from playing hockey for too long.

“I can’t stay off the ice. It’s just in my blood,” he said, adding he loves “the camaraderie, the games, the fun, the exercise — the whole thing.”

Ryan Smith, 18, suffered a heart attack while at a local handball court in December.

His best friend proceeded to call 9-1-1.

A man apparently saw the incident transpire and rushed over to perform CPR on Smith before three EMTs arrived.

“If it wouldn’t have been for that person and the police officers and the people from the ambulance, then he would have had brain damage,” said Smith’s father, Nelson Arroyo.

Now, both Smith and his father want thank this Good Samaritan.

“He just came, did what he did and disappeared. Whoever he was, he saved my life. Thank you for that,” said Smith.

EMTs needed a defibrillator to start Smith’s heart.

“I’m happy this kid was able to make it through because of these two people before us, and we just showed up and did our job. That’s all we did,” said Chris Leavitt, an EMT with Patriot Ambulance.

An emotional night Tuesday for the folks over at Parkview High School in Little Rock.

Sophomore Chris Winston collapsed during the game with Searcy.

Winston, #22, stopped breathing and they had to use a defibrillator to bring him back.

Winston was taken to the hospital where he began breathing on his own.

Early indications are he suffered a seizure, but Coach Al Flanigan says they’ll move Winston to Arkansas Children’s Hospital Wednesday to run more tests.