Shortly before noon Friday, Jeremy was running around at the edge of campus with friends. They were on their lunch break. Suddenly, the 15-year-old collapsed.
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Keegan Shepherd and Sheldon Liikala, two juniors who saw the teen sink to the ground, immediately ran to a nearby school building, said Principal Tim Praino. They knew they would find a breakroom full of teachers.
Mike Edwards the Saviour
Two of the teachers, John Bittinger and Paul Staley, who recently trained to provide first aid and CPR, rushed outside while others called 911 and radioed for one of the new defibrillators.
Praino was sprinting to the gym to get a
defibrillator, until he heard that Edwards already was en route with the machine from his office.
Edwards recently had gone through training on the defibrillator, but didn’t feel too sure of himself when he got the radio call.
Jeremy Brewer the Survivor
“My first thought was, ‘I don’t remember what they told me in the training,’ ” Edwards told the Herald Monday.But when he got to where Bittinger and Staley were performing CPR on Jeremy, he went on auto-pilot — quite literally.
The machine told Edwards it was getting ready to shock Jeremy and to not touch the teen.” The defibrillator checked if Jeremy needed a second jolt and when it decided he didn’t, told the humans to resume CPR, even letting out beeps to show them exactly at what pace to apply pressure to the chest.
Less than two minutes had passed since Jeremy collapsed — and that’s essential to avoid lasting damage.”
In the next couple of minutes, an ambulance showed up.The medics asked if the defibrillator shocked the teen and took over. They took Jeremy to Kadlec Regional Medical Center, where doctors found his heart was beating fine, but that he was not yet breathing on his own. He was flown to Seattle Children’s Hospital and was breathing on his own by Saturday.
On Monday, Jeremy was talking but appeared confused, Praino said. Doctors have said it will take the teen a few days to form clear thoughts, but that he is expected to fully recover.They also said Jeremy was “lucky to have trained individuals working on him within minutes,” Praino said.
Bittinger and Staley forced air into his lungs. Edwards had the machine to jump start Jeremy’s heart. And two students didn’t hesitate a moment to get help.”It was a great example of teamwork,” Praino said.
Just how great became apparent to Edwards only Monday — when he saw the report doctors downloaded from the defibrillator.The graph showing Jeremy’s heart activity was an almost flat, squiggly line when Edwards first attached the pads to the teen’s chest. Ten seconds after the shock was delivered, the usual sharp spikes seen on the heart rate diagram indicated his heart had started beating again.
“I got goosebumps seeing that,” Edwards said. “I thought, ‘Man — this works.’
“When the district’s safety committee discussed buying defibrillators over the summer, nobody objected, but the general consensus was that they likely would never be needed, Gribskov said.
But before the year was out, one of the relatively inexpensive machines has saved a young man from permanent damage or even death.
“We’re certainly thankful we decided to purchase them,” Gribskov said.
