First Aid Corps

A 31-year-old Sydney man who had a heart attack and died for more than five minutes after running a half marathon at the weekend says he is lucky to have collapsed near paramedics.

Jamie Donaldson the Survivor

Jamie Donaldson made it to the finish line of the Sydney Running Festival at the Opera House after running 21km yesterday before collapsing.

“I had the good fortune of collapsing at the finish line — if it had of been somewhere else I probably wouldn’t be around at all,” he told Nine News.

Startling video shows paramedics working desperately to bring the father-of-two back to life with a defibrillator.

On the third attempt, his heart started pumping again.

Mr Donaldson is fit and healthy, and this was the third long distance run he had taken part in this year.

But on this occasion he had underestimated the impacts of heat and dehydration.

“It sounds to me like I was bordering on the end,” he said.

“I’ve been told I was dead for six minutes.”

A race for one high school athlete turned into a fight for life.

Sam Shafer & Bob Wright the Saviours

A 17-year-old Decorah cross country runner collapsed Thursday evening while running in the Rich Engel Cross Country Classic at Birdsall Park in Cedar Falls. A spectator at the event, Dr. Greg Hoekstra, administered CPR until Cedar Falls police officer Sam Shafer and reserve officer Bob Wright arrived on the scene. The officers had an automated external defibrillator and administered a shock to jump-start the teen’s heart.

He was taken to Sartori Memorial Hospital.

Sartori personnel called the on-scene response a “textbook save” and noted that CPR alone most likely would not have saved the teen’s life.

Adam Riley, activities director for Decorah High School, said the student is doing well but was still in Cedar Falls for testing as of Friday afternoon.

“We’re very appreciative of the efforts of the Cedar Falls Police Department and Sartori hospital,” Riley said Friday. “We very easily could have lost a student yesterday.”

Cedar Falls police have been carrying the defibrillators in each squad car for about eight years. Each officer is recertified to use the device each year.

“Frequently, we’re on the scene before ambulances and paramedics, so you have to do what you can,” said Police Chief Jeff Olson. “We’re just thrilled when we can do something like this to help.”

Sharon Neyland, a former nurse, was watching her teenage children train on February 1 when she noticed 42-year-old David Priest had collapsed and gone into cardiac arrest. The Montmorency resident raced to him and immediately started CPR.

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“He was unconscious. You could see he was really struggling to breathe and we couldn’t find a pulse,” Ms Neyland said.

David Priest (center) the Survivor

“I yelled out to Eric (Hansson), who is the triathlon coach, to come and help me. I told him to do the respiration while I did the compressions.”

While the pair attempted to resuscitate the 42-year-old father, squad member Matthew Cross sought help from staff at the neighbouring Reservoir Leisure Centre.

Gary McAllister and Nick Zissis shocked him with a defibrillator three times before Ms Neyland continued CPR until MICA paramedics arrived.

“If I had left it longer he would have died,” Ms Neyland said.

“He wasn’t getting any oxygen to his brain and the longer you leave it you either die or have brain damage.

“I was really scared he was going to have brain damage because we had been doing CPR for so long, so I was amazed to hear he woke up and said ‘when can I go back to training’.”

All five received Ambulance Victoria bystander commendations last Monday.

Nominating intensive care paramedic Bradley Roberts said that without the early CPR and defibrillation, Mr Priest probably wouldn’t have survived.

Reservoir Leisure Centre manager Gary McAllister said the defibrillator had been an “invaluable resource”, having been obtained two years ago after much lobbying to Darebin Council.

Mr Priest, from Macleod, said he would be “forever grateful” that he was still here for his wife and children.

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.’’

A 16-year-old girl collapsed in cardiac arrest during cheerleader tryouts at North Hunterdon High School on Tuesday night and was flown to Morristown Memorial Hospital after receiving CPR from police, school staff and a parent.

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She was “awake and doing OK” at the hospital this morning, according to school spokeswoman Maren Smagala.

Veronica Conly the Saviour

The school this afternoon issued a statement congratulating the coaches and cheerleaders “for acting quickly and bravely during cheerleading tryouts last night.”

As part of tryouts, the girls were jogging through the hallways of the school when the junior collapsed in a second-floor hallway and went into a seizure, Clinton Township police said. Other girls reported noticing that she was experiencing shortness of breath before she collapsed.

The school told what happened next: Coach Veronica Conly responded quickly to the cheerleader and told cheerleader Lauren Froschhauser to call 9-1-1 on her cell phone. Head Coach Tiffany Slowinski used her two-way radio to advise trainer Karen Korbul of the emergency.

Allison Arth the Saviour

Conly found that the girl had no pulse and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the her. She did about seven cycles of CPR before Coach Allison Arth arrived to help. Arth used the automated external defibrillator (AED) to help revive the girl’s heart. Kelly Strauss, the mother of another girl at the tryouts, also helped with the effort, police said.

“I just kept saying, ‘Don’t die on me, Heather,’ “ Conly said.

By then, Clinton Township Police Officer John Tiger arrived and continued CPR on the cheerleader until the emergency medical personnel arrived. Clinton rescue squad and the Hunterdon Medical Center paramedics arrived and took over reviving the teen.

“Then the paramedics came and I just walked away and collapsed, and I cried,” said Conly. “I was just hoping she would be alive.”

The State Police Northstar medical airlift helicopter landed around 7:15 p.m. and flew the patient to Morristown Hospital. Around 8 p.m., Slowinski confirmed with the teen’s parents that she was in stable condition.

“Thanks to all the people that were on site helping during the emergency,” Principal Mike Hughes and Athletic Director John Deutsch said in the school’s statement.

“We are very proud at the response and attention that was demonstrated by the coaches and cheerleaders. You’ve demonstrated Lion pride!”

Updates

“I consider myself incredibly lucky that Ms. Conly and Coach Arth were there for me,” said Heather Skillman of Union Township in an e-mail interview Tuesday. “Without them, I don’t know what could have and would have happened. North Hunterdon has such wonderful, trained staff… I owe my good condition to them.”

Heather Skillman the Survivor

Heather doesn’t remember much about what happened. “All I can remember is running through the second-floor hallways at North, and then everything went black,” she said. “The next memory I have is a vague feeling of being in the helicopter. I didn’t even know what happened until I woke up in the hospital.”

“So far, I’m doing well,” Skillman said in an e-mail interview on Tuesday. “Recovery has been fast and if anything, I’m just tired. The doctors here are wonderful and I meet new teams every day. They’ve done a lot of tests to figure out why it happened, and soon I’ll be getting surgery to put in an implantable cardioverter defibrillator to prevent it from happening again,” she said.

“I believe everything happens for a reason,” Conly said. “I was in the right place… I would hope that anybody would do the same for me. I just did what I was trained to do.”