First Aid Corps

A man who was brought back to life after faltering within the first two miles of a marathon race in Akron is back at home and thankful to be alive.

Tony Lindeman, a 46-year-old married father of two teenage girls and a councilman in the village of Doylestown, said he felt fine before the Sept. 29 race in downtown Akron.

Lindeman, who previously had run seven marathons, remembers his friends passing him by in the beginning, as they usually do, but can’t remember what happened as he was nearing the second mile-marker.

Surgical nurse and runner Heather Pariso says she’ll never forget it.

The 34-year-old from Coventry Township said that she saw Lindemen leave the street, run onto the sidewalk and collapse.

“I just thought he tripped on uneven pavement,” she said. “I went to him right away, but as soon as I got to him, I saw he hadn’t tripped.”

Pariso managed to get Lindeman on his back and saw that he no longer was breathing. She began manually pumping his heart as other medical professionals scrambled to help, giving Lindeman mouth-to-mouth, calling 911 and praying over his lifeless body.

Within a few minutes, an ambulance arrived and used a defibrillator to restart his heart.

About a half-hour later, Lindeman awoke in the hospital. His face was raw and bloody from the fall, his chest was sore and his bones were aching. Confused, Lindeman wondered why he wasn’t running in the race.

“Today is the luckiest day of your life,” a nurse told him.

Lindeman was hospitalized for five days before his release earlier this month. He’s awaiting surgery to implant a defibrillator, but was temporarily fitted with a vest and monitoring device that will shock his heart if it stops again.

Doctors told Lindeman that his arteries weren’t blocked and that he had a healthy, strong heart.

“They told us 98 percent of the people (whose hearts stop) are due to a heart attack or a blockage,” said wife Ann Lindeman. “He’s in the 2 percent that they can’t explain.”

Lindeman said, “It was sort of like my electronic system went off that day.”

He said he doesn’t know if he’ll be allowed to run again. To be honest, he said he’s a little nervous about doing anything until he better understands why his heart failed him.

Meanwhile he and Pariso are in regular contact. He thinks of her as his “angel,” and Pariso knows she’ll never be the same.

“I hug my husband and kids a little longer now,” she said.

She said she was running behind schedule that day and wasn’t even supposed to be near the 2-mile marker where Lindeman collapsed.

“But now I feel like it was for a reason,” she said. “I was there because I was supposed to be there.”

A Knoxville teenager spent Tuesday recovering from a heart-stopping situation at Central High School. The student’s family says the scene today would be very different if not for the quick reaction of coaches and some emergency medical equipment.

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“He plays baseball and wants to be the next Todd Helton,” said Ronnie Helton about his 14-year-old son, Hunter. “But this year he decided to go out for basketball.”

Hunter Helton was running inside the Central High School gym Monday afternoon when he collapsed.

“All I remember was running and I had like a heartburn in my chest. I don’t remember anything after that,” said Hunter. “I woke up in the hospital.”

“Coach Higgins at Central High School, he said Hunter was just running and he veered off and hit the floor. There was no notice or nothing. He thought it was a seizure,” said Ronnie Helton. “I know Coach Higgins did CPR and it was through his training and that AED that saved Hunter’s life.”

“What the AED does is read the rhythm of the heart and then if a shock is necessary, as it was in this case, it shocks the heart back into a normal rhythm,” said Jennings. “There are cases where schools had AEDs and were afraid to use them. There are studies that show a 5th grader can safely operate an AED.”

The AED also saved a readout for doctors to see exactly how Hunter’s heart responded.

“It shocked his [Hunter's] heart three different times,” said a tearful Ronnie Helton. “In two minutes and 49 seconds his heart beat one time. And they shocked him two more times and at 3:49 his heart jumped back into rhythm.”

Hunter’s mother said she is thankful the medical crisis struck while he was at school.

“He wouldn’t be here today if he wasn’t at the school and they didn’t have a defibrillator and they didn’t work so quickly,” said Kelly Helton.

“I’d just like to thank all the basketball players over there that helped me and all the coaches and medical staff,” said Hunter.

Hunter’s next step is a trip to Vanderbilt in Nashville for more extensive heart tests. After that doctors will know if and when Hunter may be able to play sports again. For now, Hunter’s family is just thankful he is alive and grateful for a device they had never heard of before Monday.

“It could have been anybody’s child and it could have been at any school and them not have one [an AED],” said Ronnie Helton. “Thank God for those AEDs.”

Dr Alan Heyes, a 63-year-old semi-retired civil servant of Tonbridge Road, suffered a cardiac arrest when he was running in his own street on May 17.

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He collapsed just outside the main gate to investment company Fidelity’s offices, where a cleaner saw him fall and alerted staff.

Security supervisor Jason Hurd rushed to Dr Heyes, armed with first aid kit and defibrillator.

Dr Alan Heyes the Survivor

But when he got there, a nurse from Tunbridge Wells Hospital who happened to be driving past, had already started giving CPR.

“She explained that the casualty was unconscious and not breathing,” Mr Hurd said.

He continued the compressions while she gave rescue breaths. But Dr Heyes was still not responding. The defibrillator was connected up and he was given an electric shock.

Both Mr Hurd and the nurse put the patient into the recovery position until paramedics and Kent Air Ambulance arrived to take him to Medway Maritime Hospital.

This week, a recovering Dr Heyes said: “All I remember is I went out for a seven-mile run up to Mill Lane past Ightham Mote, made it back, going past the bus stop, then I woke up in Medway hospital.

“I was out in the open, I could have collapsed anywhere but I happened to collapse where they had a defibrillator. I was very fortunate.

“Unfortunately if someone does have a heart attack, not all offices have defibrillators. This happens more than you think.

“If it wasn’t there, it’s most likely I wouldn’t have survived.”

Dr Heyes, who had to undergo heart bypass surgery, has since reunited with the staff who saved his life to say thank you.

He is also urging offices to follow Fidelity’s example and make sure they have defibrillators on site in case of similar emergencies.

Dr Heyes said: “I consider myself to be an extremely lucky chap as everything that you would want to be in place after a cardiac arrest was available.”

Mr Hurd added: “One of the paramedics dealing with the incident told me that if we had not acted as we did and had an AED (automated external defibrillator) to hand, the outcome for this patient would have been very different.”

Rick Rawson, 69, has been a runner for nearly 40 years, joining organised social runs held by Athletics Nelson and Waimea Harriers. In his heyday, he was running anything up to 80 to 100 kilometres a week.

Rick Rawson the Survivor

He was fitted with a pacemaker in 1991 to assist a small heart defect detected during a medical examination when he applied for his taxi driver’s licence. Lately, he’s been doing more cycling to stay fit.

On July 18, he joined a group that included Kimble on a regular Wednesday night social run from the Ocean Lodge in Tahunanui. The course finished five kilometres later, outside St Stephen’s.

Rawson has no memory of anything after getting his hair cut that morning, but the story goes that he was standing in the queue at the end of the race, waiting to sign in. Seconds after he stopped, so did his heart.

Kimble, who had finished the run earlier and was already relaxing at the bar, was at his father’s side within seconds of being told he had collapsed.

“I went so fast I didn’t even look to check if there were any cars. I just sprinted across the road.”

He found his father slumped on the ground, with two people checking to see if he was breathing.

The Goldpine manager, whose workplace first aid training included learning CPR, immediately swung into action.

“I pretty much assessed the situation – he was on his side and didn’t have a pulse, and I couldn’t get his mouth open. I just threw him on his back and started pumping his chest.”

Leach then drove past.

“I saw a crowd outside the church and thought that was weird,” he said. “I did a U-turn, and it was then I heard the job called on the radio.”

Leach, who was driving a work car and had all the “tools” with him, grabbed a defibrillator and administered the first of three electric shocks.

Anaesthetist registrar James Tucker, who was also on his way home and stopped to help, put in an airway. An ambulance arrived soon afterwards.

Leach said it was the third shock that brought Mr Rawson back to life.

“He was dead,” he said when asked how ill Mr Rawson was.

“We can save dead people, but without early CPR and defibrillation, the recovery drops exponentially every minute.”

St John says survival from cardiac arrest depends on a number of factors prior to an ambulance arriving, including a bystander performing CPR and the early use of a defibrillator. This increases the chance of a person surviving a cardiac arrest from about 7 to 30 per cent.

“There were people there with knowledge and who were doing CPR well. He got lucky,” Leach said.

Rawson was taken by ambulance to Nelson Hospital’s emergency department.

His wife Sue, who had gone to play bridge as a break from planning the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary, had been taken immediately to where her husband lay in Tahunanui.

Sue Rawson arrived to see electric shocks being administered to her husband’s heart.

Rawson arrived at hospital in a critical condition, and was placed in intensive care once he was stabilised. He was “frozen down” over the next 24 hours. His son and wife never left his side.

“We sat for 50 hours waiting,” Mrs Rawson said. Kimble did not sleep from that Wednesday night until late on Friday night.

“We were told he might not come through, or that he would be brain-damaged.”

Leach said Nelson Hospital, as a secondary hospital, was lucky to have such a “fantastic” cardiology team.

“Without all the pieces of the puzzle coming into line, whatever we do is null and void.”

Rawson was flown to Christchurch for surgery on Thursday last week. He now has a new pacemaker with a defibrillator, and four stents in the arteries of his heart.

“I’m very lucky, and unfortunately I can’t tell you about any near-death experience. I don’t know what happened – it all seems surreal.”

He is now managing some light daily exercise, and said he could not say enough about the staff at Nelson and Christchurch hospitals.

Kimble is deeply grateful to all the people who helped, including his friends and Leach. “You couldn’t have asked for a better person to turn up.”

An unusual reunion Thursday brought together a teenage boy and the East San Jose firefighters who saved him from cardiac arrest two weeks earlier.

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San Jose’s Omar Vasquez, 17, and about 20 family members visited Fire Station 2 in Alum Rock to thank the eight paramedics who used a defibrillator to shock his body and get him breathing again on Feb. 16.

Omar Vasquez the Survivor

Vasquez had collapsed while running track after school at James Lick High. With the fire station just 50 yards away, the firefighters inside heard cries for help, ran past several dozen bystanders and restored his breathing about two minutes after his heart stopped beating.

An ambulance response would have taken so long that Vasquez almost surely would have suffered brain damage — and perhaps not survived — but because the fire station was located within shouting distance, he wound up fine, firefighters said.

Firefighters said it was really unusual to actually meet one of the thousands of people they help, most of which are taken to the hospital and never heard from again. Firefighters Eric Lyle, Capt. Ed Dziuba, Jason Leach, Rich Anderson, Jeff Silva, Julian Molloy, Capt. Adam Cheney and Rob Cone all helped save Vasquez.

“It brings a lot of closure to the patient, and the family — and to the firefighters,” Capt. Mary Gutierrez said. “So this is very emotional for everyone here today.”