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.

A Maxwell couple got the scare of their lives when their 5-year-old son Blake came into their bedroom in the middle of the night to say he couldn’t breathe.

“In the back of my mind I am thinking that he is going to die and there is nothing I can do about it,” said Blake’s father Jeff Braafhart.

Luckily, Blake’s mother Kristi Braafhart is a nurse at Methodist West Hospital. She had given CPR before, but never to a child, and certainly never her own child.

“He said, ‘You know, mommy and daddy, I can’t breathe.’ So I told Jeff to take him outside. I learned a long time ago with croup, you take them outside into the cold air,” Kristi said.

Jeff explained what happened after that. “I got into the kitchen and right away he started to turn blue. Right away the skin color was going out of him,” Jeff said.

“His heart had stopped and everything,” Kristi said. Jeff told Kristi she should perform CPR on Blake.

“After that I remember checking for a pulse and he didn’t have a pulse, so I started compressions,” Kristi said. “I did about five cycles of compressions and breaths and then he finally took a breath so at that point it was just amazing. Honestly I didn’t think I would bring him back. So I was kind of shocked, and when he took that breath that was the most amazing thing I have ever heard: hearing him take that breath.”

“My mommy is the coolest mommy in the whole world,” Blake said Wednesday afternoon.

The Braafharts would find out later through a series of tests that Blake has a smaller-than-normal airway. And, at the time, Blake had the H1N1 flu virus. It all combined for a very scary night.

“We hope we can teach some parents and others the importance of learning CPR because you never know when you are going to need it,” said Kristi.

A young boy is pulled from a pool unconscious, but survives, thanks to training his father learned years ago.

Brady Davis the Saviour with Son

Brady Davis jumped into action, after his two-year-old son, Branson, fell into the family’s pool in Heltonville, in Lawrence County.

Looking at this active, energetic two-year-old, you’d never know Branson Davis was near death just days ago.

“He is a miracle. He is a miracle,” said his mother, Jenny Davis.

But in the Davis’ backyard, there’s a now-dismantled, yet clear reminder of a tragedy narrowly averted.

“It’s something you can’t imagine. It’s hard. I see it every time I close my eyes,” Jenny said.

She sees the sight of her son lifeless at the bottom of the family pool.

Last Sunday, Branson climbed over the pool’s filter, presumably going after a toy.

“I went to holler for him and he always answers and he just didn’t answer and something told me just look and then I found him at the bottom,” Jenny said.

Jenny screamed for her husband Brady, and dove in.

“When I heard her screaming like I never heard her scream before, I knew it was something,” Brady Davis said.

Brady says he didn’t hesitate. He came out of the house, grabbed Branson, put him on the deck and immediately started CPR.

“He didn’t have a pulse, wasn’t breathing. He was blue. I finally got him back breathing. Then the first responders got here. They told me, ‘just keep doing what you’re doing, Dad. Keep doing what you’re doing’. It was just reaction…nothing I want to go through again.”

Brady learned CPR while serving in the Air Force.

He kept his training up-to-date through his job at a local quarry.

While he thought he might have to use CPR on a co-worker, Brady never imagined it would save his son.

He now says every parent should get trained in CPR.

“It’s real important,” Brady said.

“Because he [Branson] wouldn’t be there today if he didn’t,” Jenny added.

After two days at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, Branson is back home, back to normal and doctors told his parents he has no permanent brain damage.

It’s all thanks to lifesaving skills, given from father to son.

“I’m glad I was there. Or I wouldn’t have my boy right now”

As the operations manager for Thanksgiving! Lutheran Church, Harold Carlson had a number of things on his mind on 28th December 2009 – clearing the parking lot from the Christmas snowstorm, preparing for the annual fiscal report that was less than a month away, managing the day-to-day functions of the church.

Harold’s son, Rob Carlson, also works at T!LC. As a jack-of-all-trades handyman, Rob Carlson answers directly to his father but, on any given day, may be on the other side of the church grounds and only see him a handful of times.

Having just unloaded the first pallet of salt, Harold and Rob slid into the pickup at a few minutes before 4 p.m. to make another run. Driving up the road leading away from the church, Rob said he and his dad were just having a normal conversation toward the end of a long day.

As he turned the corner on to Lexington Avenue and headed toward the intersection of 36th Street, though, everything changed.

When Harold slouched over, Rob said his first thought was that his dad might just be nodding off after a strenuous afternoon. But when he started gasping for breath, Rob knew something was wrong with his father.

Rob Carlson didn’t even turn the truck around. Throwing it into reverse, he made his way back Lexington Avenue, rushing to get help for his father. The first person he came upon was Bob Belsaas, a part-time maintenance man at the church, the Air Force retiree and Vietnam veteran.

Rob told him something was wrong with his dad and that he needed help. As Rob drove the truck back toward the T!LC offices, Belsaas parked his tractor and ran in the same direction.

Susan Westland was wrapping up her first day as a vicar at T!LC. At the offices, she was gathering her things in anticipation of her son coming to pick her up when, all of a sudden she heard a scream from one of the office workers in the front. Someone was yelling for help.

Westland ran to the front of the building where Rob Carlson told her that his dad was in the truck unresponsive. As Rob called 911, Westland rushed out where, seeing Harold’s ashen face and recognizing that look from a similar situation she’d been in years before, she realized that he was in terrible trouble and immediately checked for a pulse.

There was none.

Belsaas had arrived at the truck and the two of them proceeded to lift Harold and lay him on top of their coats on the ground outside of the T!LC offices.

“I prayed to God and I said, ‘God, this is not working,’” Westland recalled of the moment she knew that Harold could be dying right in front of her on that cold sidewalk. “Instantly I saw the letters ‘AED’ flash into my head and I said out loud, ‘AED, AED, I wish we had an AED machine.’ Rob was standing behind me and he said, ‘We do.’”

Covering the 150 yards from the offices to the church in what must have seemed to him like an eternity but what Westland and Belsaas called an instant, Rob Carlson retrieved the defibrillator. Just as they were starting to set it up and attach the electrodes to Harold’s chest, a paramedic from the Bellevue Fire Department arrived at the scene.

Having heard the emergency call go out, the paramedic, instead of first responding to the fire station, had recognized the address and gone straight to the church. Westland and the paramedic attached the device to Harold’s chest, administering a first shock to his heart.

Right around that time, the Bellevue rescue squad arrived at the scene and took over.

Harold was transported to Midlands Hospital where he was stabilized. He was then taken to Bergan Mercy Medical Center where he underwent quadruple bypass surgery.

He choked back tears as he acknowledged everyone who had been involved in saving his life, saying he was not afraid of death but feared leaving behind a loving wife, three wonderful sons, their wives and eight grandchildren who, like he had, might only have remembered their grandfather through pictures and stories.

“Then you realize how precious life really is,” he said. “And how quickly it can be taken from you.”

The 55-year-old male, who goes to the Brock University’s faculty of education campus in Hamilton, was at the Glenridge Avenue campus playing an intramural basketball game when he collapsed about 8:15 p.m.

People nearby rushed to the man’s aid and used one of the school’s automated external defibrillators to deliver an electric shock to restart the victim’s heart.

The man’s son and his girlfriend helped administer CPR until paramedics arrived.