First Aid Corps

Wayne Millen worried for years that he’d die of a sudden heart attack.

Wayne Millen the Survivor & Family

Genetically, his odds weren’t good. His father died of a heart attack at age 66. His mother underwent heart bypass surgery when she was 66. His younger brother, after surviving two heart attacks in two years, died at age 53 of sudden cardiac arrest.

“My brother, Gary, and I were very athletic growing up and we never thought we’d have any problems,” said Millen, 60. “I realized, ‘There but for the grace of God … ‘ you know? That could happen to me.”

So Millen regularly went to the doctor. He submitted to all recommended medical tests and took medication that lowered his cholesterol to ideal levels. He worked to stay fit. And last year he bought an automated external defibrillator.

When Millen bought his, he thought he might be wasting his money — the device would be useless if he went into cardiac arrest while home alone or when he wasn’t home, or he might be fine and not go into cardiac arrest at all — but he looked at the AED as a little extra insurance.

Thinking other people might also be helped by it, Millen and his wife told neighbors they had the AED if anyone in the neighborhood ever needed it. They stashed the device in their upstairs bathroom.

It stayed untouched for a year and a half.

Last Sunday, that insurance paid off.

Millen’s 27-year-old son, who had just arrived for a weeklong family visit, used the AED to save his father’s life.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Alan Langburd, the cardiologist who treated Millen when he arrived at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. “And it’s (almost) Father’s Day.”

On that fateful day, Millen played a few quick games of basketball with his son, Jesse Millen-Johnson, who had just arrived from Utah for a weeklong vacation, and his son’s old college friends. They played for about a half-hour. Millen and his teammate won two out of three.

A forester for the U.S. Forest Service, Millen had said the week before how good he felt, how he was bounding up the steps at the forestry office. But after the basketball game, he felt tired and a little winded. That was easily explained: He hadn’t played basketball in years and he was playing now with guys half his age.

“Boy, I don’t have the energy that I used to have,” he told his wife when he went inside. “I probably shouldn’t be doing that.”

Millen grabbed a couple of baby aspirin. His neck and shoulders hurt, but he’d gotten hit in the neck during the game and he was pretty sure the pain was from that, not a heart attack. Still, the aspirin couldn’t hurt. More insurance, he thought.

He went upstairs to take a shower. He and his wife were going out.

A few minutes later, Johnson heard a thump.

She thought the computer chair in their second bedroom had fallen over. It had happened before.

“Wayne, are you OK?” she called from the other room. “Did the chair fall over?”

The only answer was the sound of labored breathing. She started running.

“I knew immediately,” she said.

Millen’s collapse almost exactly mirrored his younger brother’s.

A nurse at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, Johnson knew what to do in an emergency, but everything seemed to go wrong. She had trouble laying him flat for CPR because he was too heavy for her to move. She couldn’t get the phone to work — the family believes Millen accidentally pulled the cord out of the wall when he fell — which meant no dialing 911.

She went to the window and yelled to her son and his friends, “Emergency!”

In the seconds it took Millen-Johnson to race upstairs, his father stopped breathing. He had no pulse.

“I was like, ‘Is this the way it’s going to end?’” Millen-Johnson said. “We knew this was a possibility, but at the same time you never, ever think it would ever happen to someone you care about.”

Millen-Johnson couldn’t get reception on the cell phone he’d brought from Utah, so one of his friends called 911 on his phone. Johnson started chest compressions. She told her son to get the AED.

With shaking hands, he tore open the bag and placed the pads according to the directions. Although Millen and his wife had just gone over the AED instructions the week before — they’d happened to dust the device as they dusted the rest of the house preparing for company and Johnson took the opportunity to learn more about it — their son hadn’t encountered one since a wilderness leadership course in high school. But the directions were simple and the device spoke commands.

The AED told everyone to clear. The shock to Millen’s heart sent his body 6 inches off the ground, but it worked. He started breathing a little. The machine advised CPR while it analyzed Millen’s heart. Millen-Johnson took over the chest compressions. His mother had done them for a few minutes, but 61 years old and dealing with arthritis, she couldn’t keep it up.

“I would have done everything I could,” she said. “But Jesse’s strength was certainly good.”

A couple of minutes later, Millen stopped breathing again. The AED again told everyone to clear.

The second shock, like the first, got him breathing again.

The AED advised them to continue chest compressions. Millen-Johnson did for the next 10 minutes, fearing the heart under his hands could stop a third time and that any second his father could die again.

Millen had been right that no ambulance could get to his rural home quickly. It took paramedics about 15 minutes to reach Millen, long past the point he could have been revived if his family hadn’t used the AED.

He was on his way to the hospital, alive.

‘Every day now is a gift’

Most people who have heart attacks first notice one of several symptoms, including pain or heaviness in their chests. Millen was one of the five to 10 percent who went straight into cardiac arrest.

“His presenting symptom was sudden death,” said Alan Langburd, the cardiologist who treated Millen when he arrived at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

By the time he reached CMMC, Millen’s heart was back to a normal rhythm. At the hospital, Langburd put in a stent to open the artery and keep it open.

If Millen’s son hadn’t used the AED, Langburd said, “(Millen) probably would have died. And if he had survived, he probably would have had pretty significant neurologic impairment. Often, they just don’t wake up. Or if they do wake up, they’re mentally challenged.”

Millen had none of those problems.

Langburd has been practicing medicine for 27 years. He had never encountered someone who was saved with an AED at home.

“Jesse was a hero,” Langburd said. “(Millen) was alive and doing well by the time we got him. So he’s a hero. Truly a hero. He deserves accolades.”

“It’s extraordinary,” he added. “And it’s (almost) Father’s Day.”

Millen remembers nothing after going to his bedroom to get ready to take a shower. He woke up in the ICU. Doctors and nurses told him it was a miracle he was alive.

Medicated and disoriented, Millen was little confused at first, but at least one thing got through: When his family told him they’d used the AED, he smiled.

“So,” he said, “it worked.”

Millen spent a few days in the hospital. On Friday he was still sore from his son’s chest compressions, but he was able to move around the house. His wife and son stayed nearby. The trauma was still fresh.

“It’s pretty overwhelming,” Millen said. “I see them sometimes looking at me when I’m probably thinking the same thing: They came that close to going through a funeral this week.”

Instead, Millen-Johnson took an extra week off from work and will spend it with his parents.

“Every day now is a gift,” Millen-Johnson said.

They celebrated Millen-Johnson’s 28th birthday Saturday. And on Sunday, a holiday.

“It’ll be a very happy Father’s Day,” Millen said.

The Colorado Marathon runner who abandoned her qualifying bid to help save the life of another participant who turned out to be her father has been given an automatic entry into the Boston Marathon.

Aimee Chlebnik the Saviour with her father Bob Chlebnik

Chris Troyanos, medical coordinator for the Boston Marathon, called Aimee Chlebnik a ”hero” and said he would grant an exemption to the usual qualifying standards so she can participate in the April 2012 race.

Troyanos learned about Chlebnik’s situation from a Coloradoan story that was emailed to him by a friend in Minnesota.

”I read that story, and this woman stopped her own race to help another runner, not knowing who it was at first, and helped save his life by administering CPR,” Troyanos said. ”You’re not going to get any more of a reason for a waiver than that.”

Other participants were huddled over Robert Chlebnik, 63, of Goodrich, Mich., and performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on him about two miles from the finish line of the May 1 race when Aimee Chlebnik, 27, a certified emergency medical technician who teaches CPR classes, stopped to offer her assistance.

Her father had been walking the 13.1-mile half-marathon, which started 45 minutes later at the halfway point of the 26.2-mile marathon course.

”As near as we could tell, he did not have a pulse when I got there,” Aimee Chlebnik said. ”The most terrifying part is being an EMT and knowing when somebody’s in that situation they usually don’t come back. More times they don’t come back than they do, and my brain knew that. I was trying not to think about that and just doing what needed to be done.”

Poudre Fire Authority paramedics arrived about five minutes later, Aimee Chlebnik said, and used an automatic defibrillator to get Robert Chlebnik’s heart pumping. He was rushed to Poudre Valley Hospital, where he underwent surgery a few days later to have three stents placed in arteries.”Even to think about it now is kind of terrifying,” Aimee Chlebnik said, ”because I went from this runner’s euphoria – I was having this great race, and I was almost done; I was exhausted. It was a total switch of adrenaline from running this race to being totally concerned about my father and trying to figure out what was going on.

”Even today, it still feels like something that happened to somebody else. I tried to put myself in the EMT mode and not think about the fact that it was my father.”

Aimee Chlebnik, an outreach coordinator for the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center and volunteer EMT with the fire department in West Yellowstone, Mont., ran the Colorado Marathon twice before while earning her undergraduate degree at Colorado State University and figured it was a good race for her to try to meet the 3-hour, 40-minute Boston Marathon qualifying standard for her age group. She was on pace, she said, to finish in about 3:35 or 3:36, when she came upon her father near the 24th mile of the marathon along the Poudre River Trail, west of Shields Street.

”I was running probably the best race of my life before this happened,” she said.

Colorado Marathon race director Brian Cathcart said he was pleased Troyanos was granting Aimee Chlebnik a waiver. Colorado Marathon officials had not yet received a response to their request to race officials in Boston to grant the waiver.

Robert Chlebnik, a diabetic with a bad hip, was a frequent participant in road races and had no known heart issues prior to this incident, said his wife, Ann.

His recovery, Ann Chlebnik said, has been nothing short of remarkable. He walked a mile earlier this week, and Tuesday was driving home with her from Missouri, where they attended a family member’s graduation ceremony. If all goes as planned, Robert Chlebnik will be in Boston next year to see his daughter cross the finish line of the marathon. The family plans to return to Fort Collins next May to walk the Colorado Marathon’s half-marathon together.

‘’That would be just incredible,’’ Aimee Chlebnik said. ‘’It’d be so meaningful for me not only to be able to run Boston but to know that my father would be there to watch me finish and to know that he’s still around. He told me, ‘You should have kept going; you should have qualified,’ There are lots of races that I can run, but I only have one dad.’’

Maureen Messmer was fresh on the Redmond police force when she suddenly found herself using the CPR training she’d just had.

Maureen Messmer the Saviour

What made her even more grateful that she knew what to do? The patient was her father.

On Jan. 20, just days after she graduated from the police academy, Messmer was off duty and at her parents’ Sammamish home making lunch when she heard her mother, Dana Messmer, screaming. Maureen Messmer rushed to her parents’ room to find her father, Michael Messmer, on his bed, not breathing. The 30-year-old officer called 911 and her mother went outside to flag down paramedics.

Messmer, though terrified, started chest compressions.

“I was crying the whole time,” she said. Shortly after she began performing CPR, Messmer feared her father had died.

“All the muscle tension went away in his body. I thought he was probably dead,” she said.

But Messmer continued with chest compressions, and after about five minutes, paramedics arrived and took over the effort to resuscitate Michael Messmer, 62. The responders put him in a hypothermic state while they took him to the hospital. In all, it took about an hour to resuscitate him.

Today, Michael Messmer is recovering well and plans to soon return to work at Boeing, with a new outlook on life.

Jim Whitney and David Humblad, the Redmond paramedics who arrived first on the scene, say it was Messmer’s actions that saved her father because she kept his brain alive until they arrived.

“Maureen’s efforts saved her father. She was doing incredible CPR,” Whitney said at a news conference Thursday at the Redmond Police Department.

When Messmer’s 911 call came in, the two paramedics were at the police station taking a break from teaching a CPR refresher class to police officers. At the time, they had no idea that Messmer was a police officer, they said.

“It was the first time I’ve seen a relative doing CPR successfully,” said Humblad, who has been a paramedic for eight years.

“Thanks for not giving up,” he told the paramedics. To his daughter, he said: “I’m just totally amazed that anyone had the guts to do that. To do it for your own family must have been much harder.”

Maureen Messmer, who also serves as a lieutenant in the Washington Army National Guard, says that even though the experience was frightening, she is glad to have gone through this dramatic situation at the start of her career as a police officer.

“I’m really grateful going forward in my career, to be able to understand what families experience,” she said. She advises everyone to learn or refresh their CPR knowledge and to be persistent in their efforts, even if it appears there’s no hope.

“If this happens to you, don’t give up,” she said. “Keep going until help arrives.”

A small child’s birthday party normally isn’t news, but this was no ordinary birthday celebration for 3-year-old Kinlee Keltner, whose family celebrated her life and rejoiced in the divine favor and prayers that cover her.

Kinlee Keltner the Survivor

Last July, when Kinlee was 2, she nearly drowned in her family’s pool in Morehead. Her father, a trained CPR provider, used his skills for the first time to breathe his daughter back to life.

“It was just after supper on a Friday night,” said her dad, Brian Keltner.

“My dad, my girls — Taylee, Kessaney, Kinlee — and I decided to go for an evening swim. Minutes after entering the pool, Kinlee, right on cue, decided she needed to go potty,” he said.

Brian recalled how he took Kinlee to her mom, Sherridan, who took her to the bathroom. Meanwhile, Sherridan changed into her swimsuit. As the mother came out to the pool she asked, “Where’s Kinlee?”

“We thought she was with you,” they replied.

Sherridan immediately ran to the front door, thinking Kinlee had opened it and gone out into the road. But Kinlee had managed to open the heavy sliding glass door to the pool and entered the water on her own.

As her father began to climb out of the pool, he heard Kinlee’s grandfather yell, “No!”

Her grandfather pulled her from the bottom of the pool and placed her in her father’s arms.

“I began giving her CPR. At this point, Kinlee was blue, unresponsive and not breathing. As I began with chest compressions, white foam poured out of her mouth and eyes.

The fluid then turned amber-colored because blood was present.

All the while, Kinlee’s mother began to pray. When she saw her husband with the child, she dropped to the ground and crawled over to them, praying and holding Kinlee’s hand while Brian continued CPR.

An off-duty paramedic arrived within minutes and, finding a weak pulse in Kinlee, transported her to a waiting ambulance.

“We started praying together from the time we got in the police car to the time we arrived at the hospital,” Brian said. “We prayed without ceasing, and Sherridan asked everyone she saw, the doctors, the nurses, police officers, EMTs, even the helicopter pilot if they knew Jesus, and if they did she asked them to pray.”

Kinlee was given a breathing tube and induced into a coma to help her body rest while she was flown to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis.

Her parents could not join her in the helicopter, so they drove, praying all the way.

When they arrived at the hospital, barefoot and still in bathing suits, hospital staff escorted them to a waiting room and told them doctors would be with them soon.

“The doctors told us that Kinlee was a very sick little girl, her lungs were full of water and it appeared that she had been under water long enough to cause brain damage,” Brian Keltner said.

Doctors tried to prepare them for the possibility that Kinlee probably would not make it through the night, and if she did she might never be the same.

By that time, however, the Keltner family was part of a vast and growing prayer chain for Kinlee’s life.

“When she was pulled from that swimming pool Friday evening, lifeless, we began praying. We prayed without ceasing as a family.

“And as a family, I don’t mean only the Keltners, I mean our church family and hundreds and thousands of our brothers and sisters in Christ across the world,” Brian said.

After the report from the doctors, Brian and Sherridan began a different sort of prayer.

“We reached a point early Saturday morning where we prayed to God, ‘We know she is your child and you are just letting us borrow her, if you have to take her and that is your will, we will still love and obey you, but we believe this is not your will or your plan. We pray that you would heal her and let us keep our baby.’”

Over the course of the next few days, Kinlee’s condition steadily improved, and the following Tuesday she came home from the hospital.

“There was no medications, no pneumonia, no brain damage, nothing,” Keltner said.

Keltner spoke of uncertainty, of not always knowing what God’s plan was. He could not have known that his decision to learn CPR would one day save his own daughter’s life.

Less than a year after the accident, the Keltners gathered to celebrate Kinlee’s third birthday on Feb. 17.

Kinlee smiled, squirmed on her mother’s lap and seemed not to recognize the significance of this birthday. Her sisters and friends smiled for the camera, and dad shuttled to and from the buffet.

They are expecting a fourth child soon, another girl.

“We never take birthdays for granted anymore,” Sherridan said.

Kinlee’s father said the simplest gift, the ability to breathe, is the most profound.

“There are times I lay in bed and watch Kinlee as she sleeps. Listening to her breath, I just cry and smile knowing God has truly blessed us,” he said.

Darlene Dougherty, a sophomore at Academy Park High School, attends the DCTS Emergency and Protective Services program at the DCIU Folcroft campus and the Delaware County Training Center taught by instructor Paul Tresca and assistant Rich Caruth. Like many other DCTS students, Dougherty said the hands-on learning approach of the technical school programming appealed to her and brought more meaning to regular classroom disciplines, especially with her career goals in emergency services and law enforcement.

Only weeks after she was one of 40 students in the class receiving CPR/AED certification, Dougherty was at home in Folcroft, ready to run an errand with her dad, Joe. She looked out the window and saw him on the ground next to his truck.

“I was the only one home who could handle this. I jumped over a table and down 13 steps,” said Dougherty, noting her little brother, grandmother as well as mother returning home all added to a sense of chaos she had to overcome.

Dougherty ran outside, calling 911 on the way, and yelled to a neighbor for help. She instructed the neighbor to hold her father’s head to prevent any further head or spinal injury while she performed “textbook CPR,” according to Tresca’s recounting of the incident.

Paramedics arrived within minutes, taking over CPR and administering an AED (Automated External Defibrillator), bringing Joe Dougherty back to life. The Doughertys learned later kidney stones had created the crisis.

“My teachers really taught me something that I could use. It’s so different when you are in class for two hours and studying what you like,” said Dougherty.

Skills needed for the Emergency and Protective Services course include critical thinking, judgment and decision-making, problem solving and a high degree of motivation and self discipline.

Dougherty gave those attributes a true-to-life face, saying, “I would have given the same care to anyone, but it was my dad. I had to stay calm, do what I was taught and make no mistakes.

“What she did was unbelievable. But I have to thank Paul (Tresca) a lot for doing what he does in the class,” said Joe Dougherty, a retired corrections officer.

Although only 16, Darlene Dougherty has a clear view of what she wants to achieve in the future. She will further study EMT courses at DCTS, join the U. S. Marines for a stint, and then become a police officer.

“Darlene wanted me to stay in law enforcement, but it was time for me to retire,” said her dad, who now has the luxury of watching his daughter fulfill her ambitions.