First Aid Corps

A female student at Lancaster High School went into cardiac arrest Wednesday morning in the school. The girl collapsed right in the school’s lobby, around the time of the opening bell.

According to a spokeswoman for the district, another student got the nurse and they called 911.

The student was lucky there was also a response team already in place at the school. Fire officials tell 2 On Your Side that the girl is alive, largely because this team was so close to her.

“Thanks to their skill and our skill we were fortunate to have this young lady recover her heartbeat and breathing before she was loaded into the ambulance,” said Bob Sinclair, the first assistant chief of the Bowmansville Fire Department.

The girl fell around 7:30 a.m. Firefighters believe she is a junior or a senior. The school response team rushed to the girl and started giving her CPR.

“I can’t tell you how long it took them to get their team together and start CPR, but it was relatively quickly,” said Sinclair.

The student then regained consciousness and started talking at the school.

Firefighters say that the student didn’t go into full cardiac arrest. If she did, they say it would’ve been tough to get her back.

The student was taken to the hospital and the last we’ve been told is that she’s in intensive care.

A MELBOURNE woman who was clinically dead for almost 20 minutes was saved by first aid-savvy strangers.

Family of Leanne Jackson

Leanne Jackson collapsed two weeks ago in Scoresby while she was walking the dog with her husband, Victoria Police Inspector and Foundation Training manager Glenn Jackson.

Her heart began quivering, preventing blood from pumping to her body and brain.

“It was like the worst feeling in my life, times 100,” Inspector Jackson told the Herald Sun.

Keeping their dog’s leash secured in one hand, he used his other hand to brace her fall.

A cyclist who pulled over to help then held their dog and called an ambulance.

Another couple stopped and helped with CPR, taking instructions from an emergency operator.

“Nothing was working, she was blue,” Mrs Jackson’s sister-in-law Sue Ulbrick said.

Ambulance Victoria Advanced life support paramedic Patrick Donaldson said Mrs Jackson was clinically dead when they arrived.

“We shocked her four times before her heart started beating again,” Mr Donaldson said.

“We had no idea if she was going to pull through or not,” Mrs Ulbrick said.

Last Friday she was taken out of an induced coma.

“Not only was she alive, but she was walking and talking,” she said.

“By Tuesday she was on Facebook.”

MonashHeart director Professor Ian Meredith said ventricular fibrillation was caused by a chaotic electrical rhythm.

“The CPR actually kept her alive by keeping blood flowing to her brain,” he said.

She now has an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator which acts as a pacemaker and defibrillator.

“Without the help of those people who came to her aid, she wouldn’t be here,” Insp Jackson said.

Insp Jackson is desperate to find those who helped save his wife’s life so he returned to Ferntree Gully Rd and held up a sign saying: “Thank you. She lived.”

No one was looking at him when Paul Coyne’s heart gave out on him a week ago in the middle of a soccer game.

Coyne, 49, was playing an 8:45 p.m. match at Kemp Field in Folsom.

He’d just been subbed back in after a breather and the ball was down at the other end of the long field.

“As I ran onto the field, I said, ‘I don’t feel too well,’ and that’s all I remember.

As in: That’s all he remembers between Oct. 27, when he collapsed, and Wednesday, when his head began to clear after surgery to implant a heart defibrillator.

“Today I feel great,” Coyne said Thursday. “According to my wife, yesterday and the day before I was pretty incoherent.”

That he’s alive at all is thanks to the fact that two of his Turn Verein soccer teammates – unbeknown to Coyne – were an emergency medical technician and a Mercy General Hospital cardiac rehab program director.

“None of them (his cardiac patients) ever collapsed on me in the middle of exercise,” said Ken Rogaski, the rehab coordinator, who did chest compressions to keep Coyne’s heart going until Folsom Fire Department paramedics arrived.

“I’m so glad he said something,” said Rogaski. “Everyone was looking in the exact opposite direction.”

Rogaski’s quick actions make Coyne a rarity, a person who had a heart attack outside the hospital and survived.

“Their chances of surviving are less than 5 percent,” said Bryan Gardner, a spokesman for Mercy Hospitals.

Rogaski and another team member heard Coyne breathing, but found his pulse was irregular and weak.

Rogaski, trained in an advanced version of CPR, started the compressions.

Coyne was taken to Mercy Folsom where he was stabilized and his body cooled – a method used in recent years to give the body’s organs a better chance of surviving after severe cardiac problems.

Then he was transferred to Mercy General in Sacramento for surgery to install a cardioverter-defibrillator.

His family lives in Placerville, but his wife, Marjorie, and 18-year-old daughter Paris had to rush back from Mexico City, where Paris had a modeling job. He also has a son, John, 16.

Coyne thought he was in good shape, playing soccer three or four times a week.

His wife reminded him, “You have a history of passing out.” He would get light-headed getting up from bed.

“Not always,” Coyne said, knowing he should’ve had it checked out before.

His teammates learned something from the incident, too. The day after the attack, Rogaski ran into another teammate at a youth soccer game.

“He had already enrolled in CPR training,” Rogaski said.

“They just need to know how to do that,” Gardner said.

“Actually, I’m going to have to take a CPR class,” Coyne said.

He hopes to be back at work in a week or so. “I’m a graphic designer. It doesn’t take much to sit down and open a computer.” His online profile at his firm describes him as a “soccer fiend.”

He feels blessed to be doing anything.

“I wouldn’t be here if Ken wasn’t on our team,” he said. “I’d be dead.”

When popular southern-based harness racing equine veterinarian Dr Art Meeker suffered a massive heart attack last Thursday (June 30) there seemed little hope he would survive the ordeal. Meeker suffered the attack while tending a horse trained by Royston Carr at the Brighton Training Complex.

Dr Art Meeker the Survivor

Carr was applying Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) within a minute of Meeker falling to the ground, a process he maintained until the ambulance arrived.

He was rushed to the Royal Hobart Hospital with paramedics needing to apply defibrillator paddles twice in an endeavour to keep Meeker alive.

Mixed messages emerged with many industry participants convinced he had passed away but Meeker had other ideas.

He was placed in an induced coma for about 24 hours and late on Friday afternoon he was awake and talking to his wife Shirley and family members who had gathered at his bedside fearing the worst.

“I remember going to Royston’s stables but I have no recollection of what happened from then to when I woke up yesterday,” Meeker said yesterday from his ICU bed.

“I believe I owe my life to Royston so I’m looking forward to thanking him when I get back to his stables, which will hopefully be in the very near future,” he said.

Meeker expects to remain in hospital for at least a few more days.

“They will do an angiogram tomorrow (Sunday) to try and detect what may have caused the heart attack and then we’ll take things from there.”

“To be honest I feel really good and if it wasn’t for people telling me that I was in a very bad way I’d be pushing to get out of this place and go back to work.”

“I believe some people wrote me off but I’m still here and I mean to stay around for quite a bit longer,” he said.

While working at the Cincinnati Zoo, Sara Benjamin, a Red Cross instructor responded to a zoo patron that appeared to be going into cardiac arrest. Sara immediately performed CPR on this person and because of her quick thinking, he survived.

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“Sara has exemplified extraordinary composure during a very stressful situation and we are very proud of her unyielding compassion to help others,” said Wayne Lohmoeller, Operations Manager for the Cincinnati Zoo. “These are just a few of Sara’s leadership traits; we can all learn from her examples.”

Sara Benjamin the Saviour & Terry Huffman the Survivor

Terry Huffman wasn’t feeling very good, but he didn’t want to renege on a promise to accompany his 9-year-old nephew on an overnight field trip to the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden.

Before heading to the park that day – May 17 – the 55-year-old East End resident stopped at his workplace, Tostado’s Grill, to pick up a paycheck.

“Sit down,” his boss told him. “You don’t look good.”

“I’m fine,” Huffman said.

He remembers nothing about that night – or the next morning – at the zoo. After breakfast, about 8:30, chaperones and elementary students from Cincinnati Christian Schools were gathered in Frisch’s Theater in the zoo’s Harold C. Schott Education Center, awaiting a bird show.

That’s when Huffman suffered a massive heart attack, the kind so few survive that doctors call it a “widow maker.”

His heart stopped pumping. Without oxygen, his brain would begin to die within five minutes.

Sara, the zoo’s 25-year-old security operations supervisor, was in her office at the main entrance when the call came that someone had collapsed.

As she jumped on the first-aid golf cart, she reminded herself: Make sure you have the AED (automated external defibrillator) ready. Make sure you don’t leave it on the cart.

She arrived at the theater in less than a minute. Children were quickly being ushered out, but chaperones remained.

“It was scary,” Benjamin said. “He was lying on his back on the floor. One of the chaperones was supporting his head. His eyes were open. There was no response from him at all.”

Huffman’s face was pale. His lips had a bluish tint.

“It was all instinct,” Benjamin said. “My Red Cross training just kicked in.”

She checked that he wasn’t breathing, then began CPR – rescue breathing and chest compressions.

She asked if anyone else knew CPR. A chaperone – she didn’t catch his name – said he could help. Benjamin asked him to continue the compressions while she readied the defibrillator.

She positioned its pads on Huffman’s body. The machine analyzed his heart rhythm and indicated that he needed an electrical shock.

The shock caused his body to jump an inch off the floor.

The machine told Benjamin to continue CPR. She did until Cincinnati Fire personnel arrived and were ready with their own defibrillator. Then they shocked Huffman again.

By then, he was trying to talk.

“That was just pure relief,” Benjamin said.

She remained calm until she returned to her office, where she began to shake. It lasted the rest of the day.

Huffman said he has been lucky in life to be surrounded by many friends and family members. But he’s alive today because of the efforts of total strangers in the minutes and hours after his heart attack.

“Basically he had died,” Khan said. “Bystander CPR was the best thing that could have happened to him.”

Benjamin wasn’t exactly a bystander. Certainly she’s no longer a stranger.

“She’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in my entire life,” Huffman said.

His family contacted her at the zoo, which led to an emotional meeting while Huffman was still in the hospital. The family presented her with a plaque.

She, in turn, gave Huffman a plant, a type of tropical water lily known as lucky bamboo.

“It’s something that will grow. Something you can take care of, and it’ll stick around for a while,” she said.

Just like her new friend.