First Aid Corps

March 11 started like every other day at Timber Creek High School, with students and staff standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Savannah Vaden the Survivor

“I was in chemistry class, and we stood up to say the pledge.” the Timber Creek High School Sophomore Savannah Vaden recalled.

“She hit the ground, I heard a gasp,” Vaden’s Chemistry teacher, Shelley Hawkins remembered, “so I ran over there saw she was seizing.”

Another student helped Hawkins roll Savannah onto her side, then Hawkins called for the nurse and ran next door to get Mike King, science teacher and girls’ soccer coach.

“I had seen people having seizures before, so I wasn’t too worried about her. I just wanted to keep her safe until help arrived,” King said.

Hawkins took the other students into the next room.

Just after school nurse Thoy Fongsamouth came in, Savannah’s condition worsened.

“All of a sudden the seizures stopped, and she stopped breathing,” King said.

Fongsamouth issued a “code red” via her walkie-talkie and told office staff to call 911.

The code red triggered a team of people into action. King ran for the nearest automatic external defibrillator, or AED, other team members grabbed other AED devices around the school.

Principal Todd Tunnell and Assistant Principal James Johnson arrived as part of the code red team. Tunnell and Johnson stayed in the room while other members waited for emergency personnel or monitored hallways.

Fongsamouth and King hooked Savannah up to the AED and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

“It was a very sobering feeling hearing the computerized voice on the AED say, ‘Shocking in 3, 2, 1,’” Johnson said.

King said, “It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

“I wanted her to be ok,” Hawkins said, “and I kept just praying ‘let her be ok, let her be ok.’”

Johnson said both King and Fongsamouth kept calm during the crisis.

“To see somebody go into cardiac arrest, and then come back,” Johnson said, “it’s something that sticks with you for life.”

Erin Vaden, Savannah’s mom, arrived at the school just as a fire truck pulled up. A staff member met her at the door and took her to Savannah. She was just in time to see her daughter shocked by the AED.

“No parent should ever have to see that. I almost wish I hadn’t gotten there that quick,” Erin Vaden said. “You want to be there for your child, but you can’t handle seeing it.”

She walked back into the hall because she was so upset. A moment later, she heard that Savannah had a pulse and was breathing on her own and went back into the room.

Paramedics arrived and made sure Savannah’s condition was stable before loading her into the ambulance and taking her to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth.

Savannah stayed in the hospital for five days. Doctors were able to determine what happened, but not why.

Although she doesn’t remember collapsing, she said she’s thankful she was at school when she did. “If it wouldn’t have happened here, I wouldn’t be here today.” she said.

She now has a permanent defibrillator in her chest that will jolt her heart, if it ever stops again.

Fifteen minutes before dismissal at Bismarck-Henning Junior High School quickly became the longest minutes of Josie Siddens’ life.

Siddens, the nurse for the school district, was returning to her office March 25 when a student came running up, telling her 12-year-old Ashton Norwell was screaming in the gymnasium.

Norwell was being led to Siddens’ office because he felt sick when he began to cry out in pain. But by the time Siddens — who was only seconds from the gymnasium — arrived, the boy was unresponsive and not breathing.

From there, Siddens went into action, moving the boy to the gym floor with the help of a gym teacher while Principal Rusty Campbell called 911. Another gym teacher stepped into the hallway to retrieve an automated external defibrillator hanging on the wall.

“I was looking at (the scene) saying ‘This is not happening here,’” said Siddens, a part-time emergency room nurse at Provena United Samaritans Medical Center. “From there it was just gut reaction.”

Siddens said she used the defibrillator immediately and then began CPR. She repeated the process, but was getting no response from Ashton, who had turned blue.

“I was scared the entire time, but from the second shock on I was saying ‘C’mon, buddy. C’mon, Ashton,’” Siddens recounted.

Suddenly, following the third shock from the defibrillator, Ashton drew a quick gasp of air.

Oxygen provided by Bismarck Community Ambulance helped bring him around and by the time Medix Ambulance personnel arrived, the lifeless boy was cracking jokes at his school nurse.

“There’s never been a better sound in my life than hearing him talk to me,” she said. “It was just fantastic.”

It may have only been a few minutes, but the scene was emotionally draining for Siddens.

“I’m fine during the emergency, I can handle myself well during the emergency,” she said. “But immediately after the emergency, not so well. Lots of people held me up after that.”

Lowell Elementary School Principal Susan Howard, 58, collapsed during a staff meeting Wednesday morning at the Warren Township school.

Susan Howard the Survivor

When colleagues rushed to her side, they found her unresponsive — and could not detect a pulse.

Two teachers, Christy Hartman and Anne McGrath, quickly grabbed one of the school’s portable defibrillator units and applied the training they had received on how to use the device.

Simultaneously, another staff member rushed to call 911.

After receiving the defibrillator’s shock, Howard regained a pulse.

Today, Howard was recuperating at Community Hospital East, where doctors determined that she had suffered a ventricular fibrillation.

“Her cardiologist and the paramedics said if not for the defibrillator and the training of the staff, she would have lost her life,” said Linda Wise, executive secretary at Warren Township Schools’ central office.

The principal’s husband, Mike Howard, had told Wise she could share Howard’s story as a testament to the device’s value.

“We’re all very thankful,” said Jennifer Holdcraft, student dean at Lowell.

The staff learned today that doctors have determined Howard sustained no permanent heart damage from the incident, which occurred at around 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Holdcraft was unsure exactly when Howard would return, but she wouldn’t be surprised to see her soon.

“This is her school, and she loves it dearly,” Holdcraft said.

Virgil Bramblett had just arrived at Hickman High School on Nov. 17 to help repair the school stage. For four hours that morning, the Columbia Public Schools carpenter had felt an uneasy pain in his chest. Muscles near his heart were sore, he thought.

Virgil Bramblett the Survivor

So he walked to the school nurse’s office — on the northeast side of Hickman — a five-minute walk from the school’s main office, where the automatic external defibrillator, or AED, rests.

At about 7:15 a.m. that day, the school’s licensed practical nurse, Cara Baker, had just arrived at work. She led Bramblett to a cot in the nurse’s office. Bramblett asked her to take his blood pressure because of chest pains.

After the blood-pressure reading, Bramblett popped up from the cot, ready to go to work. On his feet, though, he felt dizzy. Seconds later, he was on the cot again, unconscious. Evans and Baker moved him to the floor and began CPR, and Evans shouted at Lisa Chalupny, the office secretary, to call 911.

Do you need the AED?” Chalupny asked, referring to the defibrillator.

“Yes!” Evans replied.

Assistant Principal Tracey Conrad was standing near a stairway in the Hickman Commons when she heard home-school communicator Talisha Payne’s voice on the walkie-talkie asking for the AED.

Conrad sprinted toward the box on the wall containing the defibrillator. School office worker Theodore Hanfelder already had the machine and handed it to Conrad, who dashed to the nurses’ office.

When Conrad reached the office, Evans grabbed the AED as Baker continued CPR.

The AED showed Bramblett’s heartbeat was irregular and that he was having his fifth heart attack. The machine advised Evans to send an electrical shock into him. She pushed the button.

After the AED shock in the nurse’s office, Bramblett seemed to stabilize. The nurses said he even spoke to them.

“I’m so sorry,” he told them. “Thank you so much.”

Evans told him emergency crews were coming. “Oh, I gotta get back to work,” the nurses said he told them.

Bramblett was released from the hospital Nov. 19 and advised to not work for at least a month.

Brenda Bramblett remains anxious about her husband’s health. “It’s just really scary when he leaves the house every day,” she said.

They’re just three big words – Automated Electronic Defibrillator – but for 16-year-old Zachary Harper and his family, they’re words to live by.

Zachary Harper (2nd from left) the Survivor

On an otherwise routine school day last month, Harper, a junior, was minding the school store with a couple of friends when he suddenly grew light-headed.

Seconds after he staggered to teacher Dana Bourassa’s classroom to get a pass for the nurse, it was lights out.

“That’s the last thing I remember,” the slim, black-haired teen said this week at home, where he and his family gathered to piece together the seconds and minutes that, had it not been for nurse Mary Arrowsmith, assistant principal Diane Doran, and teachers Bourassa and Jim St. Onge, would almost certainly have been his last.

Craven said that although Arrowsmith restored Harper’s heartbeat with the AED “in about a minute,” the teen wasn’t yet out of the woods. “He was lost again in the hallway, and there were about four more life-saving maneuvers that were performed on the way to the hospital,” Craven said.

Harper was first rushed to Southern New Hampshire Medical Center in Nashua, then flown – in 16 minutes, according to mom Deb Harper, who accompanied him – to Children’s Hospital Boston.

A lot of things went through his head as he lay at Children’s Hospital Boston recovering, Harper said. One vow he made, for instance, was to swear off of junk food forever.

“Well, I guess that’s been broken a little bit since I got home,” he said Monday with a sheepish grin.