First Aid Corps

Jim Van Cleve stepped up to home plate and hit a single. When the next player came up to bat, Van Cleve stepped off first base, ready to run to second. Instead, he collapsed.

Jim Van Cleve the Survivor

He was near death.

It was his lucky day.

An emergency medical technician was working the game and a cardiologist was in the crowd for the June 26 Bristol Alumni and Athletic Association seventh annual exhibition softball classic at the Bristol Borough Little League Field. And EMT Ken Hopkins remembered to bring along his automatic emergency defibrillator.

Both saw Van Cleve fall.

“The crowd started acting funny …,” said Hopkins, of the Bucks County Rescue Squad. “I ran to my truck and grabbed medical equipment used to treat cardiac arrest.”

At first Hopkins thought Van Cleve, 72, was having a seizure, but then he stopped breathing. Dr. Daniel Vile from Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia knew he was suffering a heart attack.

Hopkins and Vile arrived at Van Cleve’s side about the same time. Vile began administering CPR, then Hopkins used the AED.

“I remember earlier that day I was on bike detail and remembered to bring the AED with me to the softball game,” Hopkins said. “That device saved Jim’s life.”

Van Cleve of Bristol Township had stopped breathing and his heart had gone into an abnormal rhythm when the EMT defibrillated him several times to bring back his pulse. Minutes later, he was placed on a stretcher in an ambulance and an IV of lidocaine was placed in his leg, to stabilize his irregular heart rhythm. Still unconscious, he began breathing on his own on the way to Lower Bucks Hospital, where he woke up shortly after.

“All I remember is getting ready to run to the next base and then waking up in a hospital room,” Van Cleve said. “It’s still hard to believe.”

Hopkins, Vile and Van Cleve met Tuesday, the first time since the incident, at the same field.

“Ken and Daniel saved my life. I believe what happened that day was a miracle,” Van Cleve said, wiping tears from his eyes. “After I got out of the hospital I heard that when Ken was giving me medical treatment during the game, many players and people in the stands crowded around home plate and said a prayer for me. There were an awful lot of angels there.”

And the AED.

“In my 15 years as a firefighter, first responder and EMT, I’ve been involved in two cases like this where the person survived the heart attack,” Hopkins said. “In these cases, they survived because an AED was used.”

Van Cleve’s heart attack and subsequent treatment shines a light on a bigger problem: the lack of AEDs in the community, said Hopkins.

“We need these devices in more places in the community,’’ he said. “Whether it’s the baseball field, supermarket or any public place, we need them and training for people on how to use them.”

Even if CPR is performed, defibrillation from an AED is required to stop the abnormal rhythm and restore a normal heart rhythm, according to the American Heart Association website.

Without that, Van Cleve wouldn’t be making plans to play in next year’s softball game.

“I feel great now, I just got back from a vacation to Israel,” he said, grinning. “My new pacemaker got me out of all the long airport security lines.”

On Wednesday, April 27, at Wilpon Softball Complex, the Wolverine softball team had just finished their practice session on the field and coach Carol Hutchins, assistants Bonnie Tholl and Jennifer Brundage were sitting down with a recruit and her father, watching a highlight video of Michigan softball.

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At the conclusion of the video, the father’s head tilted back and Hutch thought he was looking up at the lights.

Carol Hutchins, Bonnie Tholl, Jennifer Brundage the Saviours

They called out the father’s name. He was unresponsive, his eyes were open. That’s when the ‘team’ went into action.

Tholl immediately called 911, while Hutchins and Brundage tried to lay the father down flat. Once he was on the floor, Hutch immediately gave him CPR, starting with two short mouth-to-mouth breaths.

Jennifer quickly went to get the automated external defibrillator (AED) located at the front door, while Hutch was working on the compression portion of the CPR. Once the AED was brought over, Hutch opened the man’s shirt and the defibrillator pads were placed on his chest.

Brundage yelled at Hutch to get her hands off the father. The AED must first analyze the situation and any outside influence would not allow the rescue equipment to do its job.

Once the AED analyzed the individual, the AED read ‘Shock Advised.’ They are words that our softball coaches will never forget.

All three coaches looked at the AED to make sure what they read was what they needed to do. At that point, they applied the shock.

According to Jennifer, he didn’t bounce, the shock made him jump.

“I don’t think any description about the bounce effect does it justice until you see it,” said Brundage.

While all this was happening, the softball freshmen were in the locker room, talking and calming the recruit, while the emergency took place in the team lounge. All this happened in minutes, maybe seconds. The ambulance arrived and the recruit’s father was rushed to the University of Michigan Hospital.

The father survived and the Michigan softball coaching staff is credited with the biggest save of their careers. They saved a man’s life.

Training, practice and the resolve of this staff to save the recruit’s father made these few minutes more important than any sporting event could ever be.

This wasn’t just a game; it was truly a matter of life and death. This time they beat death. That is a big time victory.

Cody Ching was at baseball practice Jan. 21 when he collapsed. His coaches say practice had just started and Ching was warming up pitching when, inexplicably, he fell to the Clackamas County College’s gym flooring.

Cody Ching the Survivor

Teammates rushed to Ching’s aid, including Zach Miller, who says he knew Ching was in bad shape right away.

“To look down on him and see his purple face, no pulse, our coach doing CPR — it’s kind of like one of those things,” Miller says. “I wasn’t sure if he was going to come back.”

That coach, Robin Robinson, has coached the Cougar baseball team for nearly 21 years. He says within a few seconds of being notified of Ching’s heart attack, he had started CPR.

“There’s no question in my mind that I was going to continue to pump on that heart until somebody killed me or he died or somebody took us apart,” Robinson says.

Ching says he doesn’t remember any of the events leading up to his heart attack.

When paramedics rushed him into the emergency room, he was unconscious and there been no blood flow to his brain for nearly 8 minutes.

Ching’s father, Davin Ching, says the family was shocked at what happened. He says his son has always been athletic and healthy; there have never been any warning signs that something was wrong with his son’s heart.

Davin Ching says his son was never specially tested for any heart condition before going into cardiac arrest, but says after January’s incident, he wants all parents to have their student-athletes tested.

Doctors put Cody Ching in a medically induced coma to help stabilize his brain. As family and friends gathered by Cody Ching’s bedside, doctors warned the family he was likely going to suffer from brain damage.

“He’s 6 foot 3, 200 pounds, to see him laying here on the hospital bed, it’s just a parent’s worst nightmare,” Davin Ching says.

Remarkably, Cody Ching didn’t suffer any brain damage. Aside from some short-term memory loss from the day of the heart attack, he is doing well.

Doctors implanted a defibrillator in his chest and the family says surgeons placed the device on the right side so he could one day pitch left handed.

“I’m just trying to focus on getting back into shape and getting caught back up on my school work that I missed,” Cody Ching says.

On May 3, 62-year-old Bucks County school coach John Gleeson was throwing batting practice in the left-field batting cage.

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Standing about 45 feet from the batter, shielded by an L-shaped screen commonly used by teams, Gleeson was pitching to Jake Skolnick – “our hardest hitter,” co-coach Vince Campellone said.

John Gleeson the Survivor

Campellone then heard the clang of a line drive hitting a bar of the screen.

Turning toward the cage, Campellone saw Gleeson facedown on the ground, his body twitching.

Campellone ran over and yelled for players to get the trainer.
Campellone rolled Gleeson onto his back, opened his mouth, and made sure he wouldn’t swallow his tongue.

Tyler Campellone, Vince’s son and a sophomore outfielder on the team who recently took a CPR course, started resuscitation.

Trainer Juana Bivins ran over from the gym behind center field, and used the defibrillator on Gleeson. A student trainer called Gleeson’s wife, Connie, who works at the school’s Children’s Center, and she arrived just in time to see a shock from the defibrillator jump-start his heart.

“It was very fortuitous the way that things fell,” John Gleeson said. “I could have been [at home] mowing the grass all by myself and had my blocked arteries kicked in, and I would have been in pretty bad shape because there would have been no one around. As it was, getting hit in the head with a line drive was almost a blessing in disguise, because it kicked off this whole series of things.”

Gleeson was rushed to the nearby St. Mary Medical Center. Five of his arteries were blocked.

Gleeson wants to return to coaching this fall for his son’s last football season, saying he has dreamed about it for a long time. If his heart exams go well, he could be ready for the mid-August start of practices. But if doctors say he needs a defibrillator implanted, he likely will miss the opening of the preseason.

As for Skolnick, the player who hit the fateful line drive, Gleeson said the senior went through the instinctual “Oh, my God, what have I done?” phase.

“But as I’ve told him and everybody has told him since,” Gleeson added, “it was a blessing in disguise, that in some ways you set off a series of events that probably will prolong my life for quite a while.”

Hunter Cairns plays high school baseball in Los Alamitos.

Hunter Cairns the Survivor

Last July, Cairns was at bat and attempting to bunt, but the pitch came in low and fast, smacking him hard in the chest.

Cairns’ grandfather, Jack Lee, retired from the Long Beach Fire Department, his grandfather’s friend, Steve Roberts, an active duty fireman with the LBFD, and his dad, Jason, were watching from the third base line and knew it was a wallop.

Cairns ran about 50 feet toward first base and collapsed face down in the dirt.

When the first base coach turned Cairns onto his back, he took one look at Cairns’ face and shouted for someone to call 911.

Lee and Roberts rushed to Cairns. They ripped open his shirt to look for broken ribs, but saw none. Lee started chest compressions while Roberts performed rescue breaths.

When paramedics arrived, they told the men to continue performing CPR while they began defibrillation.

After the first shock, Cairns started breathing on his own. He was taken to a hospital, where he regained consciousness 17 hours later.