First Aid Corps

On Nov. 1, 66-year-old Henderson County Senior League Softball player Bill Curtis suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and died … four times.

Bill Curtis the Survivor with Tom Hendley and Ed Neace the Saviours

Thanks to the quick response of his fellow players, Tom Hendley and Ed Neace, and the fact that the league recently purchased a defibrillator to take to its games, Curtis is alive and well and able to tell his story.

“I remember reaching second base. After that, the next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital four days later,” said Curtis, who prior to the event had never had any health problems and had never been hospitalized.

Bill’s wife, Nancy, was at his bedside when he awoke.

“The first thing he said when he woke up was that he remembered hitting the ball hard over Ed’s head in the outfield and how mad Ed was,” Nancy Curtis said.

After Bill Curtis hit his double, the next batter hit a ball to the outfield to Neace.

“There were two outs, so Bill was running from second to third. Then he took off for home, hoping I’d miss the ball,” Neace, 63, said. “I caught it. I was coming in from the outfield when I saw it happen.”

Neace said Bill Curtis stumbled a little and then went head first into the fence.

“I didn’t realize it at the time. I was running back to the dugout from the field, then I saw someone lying down on the ground. I said, ‘Who’s down? Who’s down?’ Then I saw it was Bill. I rushed over to him and Tom was already there,” Neace said. “He said, ‘Call 911. He’s not responding.”

Just a few weeks before Bill Curtis’ cardiac arrest, several of the Henderson County Senior League softballers had participated in a CPR training class conducted by Dan Hayes of the EMS. Hendley, the Senior League’s president, had suggested the class for his fellow players and also suggested that they purchase a defibrillator to have at all their games.

“We had the training about 4-5 weeks earlier, and praise the Lord we had that training,” Neace said.

Hendley, 66, a retired police officer from New Jersey, was the first to see Bill Curtis go down.

“I went to him and turned him over, and he had a gash on his head where he had hit the fence,” Hendley said. “So I didn’t know if he had just tripped and hit the fence and that was his problem or if the problem had happened before that. When I saw that he was unresponsive, I knew the problem happened before he hit the fence.”

Without hesitation, Hendley and Neace put their training into action.

“So then I opened up his airway and tried to help him to breathe, and then I saw his eyes roll back, I knew we had lost him,” Hendley said.

Hendley immediately got the defibrillator and hooked Bill Curtis to it.

“The machine takes a few seconds to analyze, and it will tell you whether or not a shock is needed. When I hooked Bill up to it, it said ‘shock advised,’ so we shocked him. His body went clean off the ground, and we all stood back,” Hendley said. “It’s quite a jolt.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t remember that,” Bill Curtis laughed.

After Hendley felt a faint pulse from the shock of the defribillator, he was trying to get Bill Curtis to breathe while Neace did chest compressions.

“We were both focused and working so feverishly to help Bill that we didn’t even notice the EMS guys arrive,” Hendley said.

“I was doing the chest compressions when I got tapped on the shoulder. It was the EMS guy, and I kept working and said, ‘Hang on, I’m still working on him.’ After the EMS guy took over, I had a sigh of relief,” Neace said.

“We were so into what we were doing, we didn’t know how much time had passed,” Hendley said.

“I know it wasn’t long before the EMS guys were there, but from the time he went down to the time they arrived, it seemed like an eternity. Everything was like in slow motion,” Neace said.

When EMS did take over CPR, Bill Curtis went into cardiac arrest again.

“The EMS guys got there and worked on him and then had to shock him again,” Hendley said. “Then they got him on the ambulance and took him to Pardee (Hospital).”

Bill Curtis’ nightmare wasn’t over yet. His heart stopped twice more in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

“They said he died four times … twice on the field and twice in the ambulance,” Neace said.

“That means he has five lives left,” Nancy Curtis said.

Once he was revived and doctors performed tests on him in the ICU, there was great news.

“The doctors said there was no heart or brain damage,” Neace said.

“The doctors said they were expecting to find some kind of blockage in the arteries and they were fully expecting to have to do heart surgery. They found nothing. They said I had a healthy heart, and they still have no clue why it stopped that day,” Bill Curtis said.

There were no warning signs for Bill Curtis, and on his official discharge papers from the hospital, the diagnosis was “sudden cardiac death.”

“They say there’s only like a 6 percent chance of surviving that,” Bill Curtis said.

Nancy Curtis remembers the call and was preparing for the worst when she made her way to Jackson Park that day.

“What’s strange is that Bill and I had talked just the night before about what would we do if something happened to one of us. We’ve been together 45 years, and being together with someone that long, I truly believe you get a sixth sense about someone. It was like we knew something was about to happen,” she said.

Bill Curtis is getting used to his new lifestyle after the event. Now, he has a device that will shock his heart, along with a pacemaker to regulate it, if cardiac arrest happens again.

One thing he’s having a hard time adjusting to is the fact that he can’t drive.

“I guess the law is that if you die, you aren’t allowed to drive for six months,” Nancy Curtis said.

But he will be allowed to get back on the field in just six weeks.

“That’s incredible when you think about it and when you witnessed what we did that day,” Neace said. “But if you knew what kind of a person Bill is, it wouldn’t really surprise you. He runs three miles a day, and he’s in better shape than most anyone on that field. He was the last person in the world I thought that would happen to.”

Bill Curtis has already been back to the field, cheering on his fellow players, but he’s itching to get the bat in his hands once again.

“He’s a great player, and we can’t wait to get him back,” Hendley said.

And Bill’s wife isn’t about to hold him back from the sport he loves.

“I truly believe that if Bill would’ve been home with me that day, and I live just a quarter-mile from Mission Hospital, he would be dead or brain damaged. It would’ve taken too long for trained help to arrive,” she said.

“For women worried about their men playing softball, let me say this: There is no safer place for your man to be than at Jackson Park on any Tuesday or Friday if it doesn’t rain or snow.”

No one was looking at him when Paul Coyne’s heart gave out on him a week ago in the middle of a soccer game.

Coyne, 49, was playing an 8:45 p.m. match at Kemp Field in Folsom.

He’d just been subbed back in after a breather and the ball was down at the other end of the long field.

“As I ran onto the field, I said, ‘I don’t feel too well,’ and that’s all I remember.

As in: That’s all he remembers between Oct. 27, when he collapsed, and Wednesday, when his head began to clear after surgery to implant a heart defibrillator.

“Today I feel great,” Coyne said Thursday. “According to my wife, yesterday and the day before I was pretty incoherent.”

That he’s alive at all is thanks to the fact that two of his Turn Verein soccer teammates – unbeknown to Coyne – were an emergency medical technician and a Mercy General Hospital cardiac rehab program director.

“None of them (his cardiac patients) ever collapsed on me in the middle of exercise,” said Ken Rogaski, the rehab coordinator, who did chest compressions to keep Coyne’s heart going until Folsom Fire Department paramedics arrived.

“I’m so glad he said something,” said Rogaski. “Everyone was looking in the exact opposite direction.”

Rogaski’s quick actions make Coyne a rarity, a person who had a heart attack outside the hospital and survived.

“Their chances of surviving are less than 5 percent,” said Bryan Gardner, a spokesman for Mercy Hospitals.

Rogaski and another team member heard Coyne breathing, but found his pulse was irregular and weak.

Rogaski, trained in an advanced version of CPR, started the compressions.

Coyne was taken to Mercy Folsom where he was stabilized and his body cooled – a method used in recent years to give the body’s organs a better chance of surviving after severe cardiac problems.

Then he was transferred to Mercy General in Sacramento for surgery to install a cardioverter-defibrillator.

His family lives in Placerville, but his wife, Marjorie, and 18-year-old daughter Paris had to rush back from Mexico City, where Paris had a modeling job. He also has a son, John, 16.

Coyne thought he was in good shape, playing soccer three or four times a week.

His wife reminded him, “You have a history of passing out.” He would get light-headed getting up from bed.

“Not always,” Coyne said, knowing he should’ve had it checked out before.

His teammates learned something from the incident, too. The day after the attack, Rogaski ran into another teammate at a youth soccer game.

“He had already enrolled in CPR training,” Rogaski said.

“They just need to know how to do that,” Gardner said.

“Actually, I’m going to have to take a CPR class,” Coyne said.

He hopes to be back at work in a week or so. “I’m a graphic designer. It doesn’t take much to sit down and open a computer.” His online profile at his firm describes him as a “soccer fiend.”

He feels blessed to be doing anything.

“I wouldn’t be here if Ken wasn’t on our team,” he said. “I’d be dead.”

Rob Farnfield, 54, of Hackney Road in Matlock, was refereeing a match at Matlock Rugby Club last November when he had a heart attack and collapsed.

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Fortunately, two off-duty nurses were watching the game and gave him valuable resuscitation (CPR) until the First Responders arrived with a defibrillator, a portable piece of life saving equipment that delivers an electric shock through the chest wall to help restore the heart’s normal rhythm.

Rob Farnfield the Survivor

He was then taken by air ambulance to the University Hospital Coventry.

Rob, who was unconscious throughout most of the ordeal, was told he was resuscitated seven times.

He said: “There were about ten minutes to go in the game when I collapsed on the pitch. There was no warning or any pain. It was as if someone had just turned the power off.”

He added: “I felt fine beforehand. I’m reasonably fit, don’t have blood pressure or the things you would associate with a heart problems

After having a stent fitted, Rob spent five days in hospital recovering before taking on cardiac rehabilitation at the Whitworth Centre in Darley Dale.

He now takes part in gym sessions especially for heart patients, at Arc Leisure Matlock and within less than a year has gone from being able to walk just a few feet to walking from Matlock to Derby.

Rob has not refereed at Matlock Rugby Club since his heart attack but has been to the club base, at Cromford Meadows, many times since and the charity has paid for a defibrillator for the club house.

A seventh-grade Azle boy is in good condition less than 24 hours after he collapsed and stopped breathing during a junior high football game Tuesday evening at Azle Junior High School.

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The boy, whose name has not been released, was on the field when he suddenly collapsed, coach Tim Spoonemore said. Unaware of how severe the boy’s injury may be, Spoonemore and coach Brad Averitte rushed on to the field and turned the boy over with Averitte bracing the athlete’s neck.

Adults Honored for Saving Collapsed Azle 7th Grader: MyFoxDFW.com

The coaches quickly realized the boy was unresponsive and had no pulse. While Spoonemore began performing CPR, Averitte continued to brace the boy’s neck while talking to him, comforting him and trying to get him to respond. After a short time, a parent stepped in and took over CPR while Spoonemore left to get one of two automated external defibrillators.

Rita White, a nurse with the district who happened to be watching the game from the stands, said she ran onto the field to help when she saw that the coaches had started CPR. A short time later assistant principal Brian Roberts arrived with the first AED. White, who trains district employees to use the device, then used the device on the player — and he began to breathe.

“I saw his stomach start moving, and that was just the greatest thing,” Spoonemore said during a news conference Wednesday. “When I saw him … getting in the ambulance and he was breathing, that just made my heart jump out of my body almost.”

The player was eventually rushed by helicopter to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, where he remains Wednesday.

The boy’s family has decided not to speak publicly, but did say Wednesday morning that their son is in good condition and that everyone involved in saving their son’s life is a hero.

“It was a team effort. Everyone was here. Everyone had a very important part. No one person is a hero,” said White.

“Going over the scenario again and reliving what everybody in the community from the coaches, to the nurses, to the parents, to the administration, everything that they’ve done has really made today a fantastic day. A young man has life, a father has a son, a mother has a son and it doesn’t get any better than that,” said Averitte.

Azle superintendent Ray Lea arrived at Azle Junior High School minutes after it happened Tuesday and said the entire experience was surreal and that he is the world’s biggest fan of having AEDs on campus.

“Everybody there was in tears and just really shocked. This is just unheard of at a junior high school football game. It was surreal,” Lea said. “I couldn’t be any more proud of my staff to perform the way they did and rescue this young man. I don’t think the young man would be here without the AED.”

Last Wednesday, Ali Askari was dead for about 15-minutes.

View First Aid Corps World Map of AED Locations in a larger map

“As I’m sitting here talking to you, I really shouldn’t be,” said Askari, soccer player.

Askari, 51, was playing with his adult soccer team in Balch Springs when his heart stopped.

“All of a sudden I felt dizzy,” Askari recalled. “I felt my knee gave up. And I was just getting closer to the ground. But I didn’t feel the hitting. I remember that I wanted to keep going but I couldn’t.”

Surveillance video from Premier Park in Balch Springs showed the fuzzy mob of team-mates gathering around his fallen body on the soccer field.

Two doctors on the team started CPR.

It was a player on the other team who offered a life-saving assist..

“And I yelled out to them,” said Chris LeBlanc, who played for the Balch Springs team, “Hey do you need the defibrillator?

Surveillance video captures LeBlanc running to the complex building, retrieving the AED, and handing it off to one of Askari’s teammates.

Unlike UIL sanctioned youth events, automated external defibrillators or AED’s are not required for recreational or adult sports leagues.

The ‘Over 40′ aged players at Premier Park in Balch Springs insisted on having an AED handy.

“The majority of our players are older,” says Larry Hall, president of Premier Park. “And they requested that we have a difib here just in case. It’s one of those things where you hope you never need to use, but you hope you have it just in case you do.”

“The first attempt I hear did not work,” says Askari. “Nothing happened. Second attempt, I came back.”

Two days later, Askari had a defibrillator implanted surgically.

While he may never be cleared to play soccer again, he’s expected to recover fully.

He was given a signed game ball signed by members of both teams who witnessed his collapse.

Ali Askari believes the only reason he avoided an unexpected and ultimate red card is because there were two doctors and an AED at the game.