First Aid Corps

Six women entered the pool for the women’s 100 yard breaststroke at the Florida Senior Games.

Sylvia Eisele the Survivor

Their ages ranged from 75 to 86.

As two other swimmers who were not competing in the race watched from behind the starting block, their eyes locked on one of the competitors who gracefully swam from wall to wall.

“Look at lane 5,” one of them said. “Such a smooth stroke.”

Indeed, lane 5 was full of grace as Sylvia Eisele — who nearly died during a race two years ago — embarked on a memorable day.

In addition to her aquatic elegance, Eisele did make a really big splash on Saturday at Gandy Pool in Lakeland.

Following a two-year absence from competitive swimming, the 82-year-old from the Cypress Lake section of Fort Myers returned to the water in record-setting fashion.

As her husband, Nicholas, watched from the sidelines, Eisele competed in three races and set Florida Senior Games age group records in every one.

“It’s been a great day for her,” Nicholas proudly stated.

“I enjoy the water. I love the water,” Eisele said. “I should have been a fish, not a human being.”

For the past two years, Eisele was a fish out of water.

Two years ago, swimming and everything else in her life came to a sudden halt. Near the end of a long day at a Canadian national competition in Toronto — close to the couple’s home in Mississauga — Eisele suffered a heart incident during a race.

“Two arm lengths from the wall, I felt a pain in my head and I was gone,” she recalled. “I was sinking.”

“Her heart stopped,” said Nicholas.

After being pulled out of the water, lifeguards quickly went to work. One provided mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while the other grabbed a defibrillator.

“I was dead on the deck,” Eisele said. “They had to get a defibrillator to get my heart going.”

The prompt response saved Eisele’s life.

“We were so lucky that there was such good medical help available,” Nicholas said.

Her recuperation in a hospital lasted nine days.

Her absence from competitive swimming lasted two years.

“It’s been rough on her because she’s been a competitor all her life,” Nicholas said.

Before she arrived in North America more than a half-century ago, Eisele was an elite swimmer in her native Austria.

The competitive juices that flowed back then — be it in swimming, tennis, cycling or downhill skiing — are still present today in the pool.

“I like competition. I’m a very competitive person,” she said.

Eisele has been a fixture in the local swim scene since she and her husband moved to Fort Myers 25 years ago. She is a longtime member of the Swim Florida club program run by Mac Kennedy. Eisele still practices right next to the program’s young swimmers.

“Mac gives me a lane. He treats me very nicely,” she said.

Eisele, who has competed around the globe — from Australia to Brazil to Germany to New Zealand and has held world records in masters swimming — showed no signs of rust as she returned to the lanes for competition on Saturday.

Accompanied by a device that is implanted near her collarbone in order to make sure her heart beats the way it’s supposed to, Eisele set new age group records for the women’s 80-84 division in the 100 yard breastroke (2:02), 100 yard individual medley (2:02) and 50-yard breastroke (:53.50).

“She swims the 50 faster than I can walk it,” said Nicholas, 85.

On this day, the records didn’t carry quite as much significance for Eisele. Simply being back in the pool for competitive races was enough of a reward.

“I like to be active,” she said. “I like to do things to stay healthy, mentally and physically, that’s the key.”

Crawford Best, 72, a professional bassoonist, lifelong runner and peak-bagger, survived an unexpected heart attack that struck while he was in the Glenwood Hot Springs Pool, thanks to quick work by pool lifeguards with CPR and a defibrillator, followed by expert care at Valley View and St. Mary’s hospitals.

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“All those people saved my life. There are no two ways about it,” the Santa Fe, N.M., man said Friday, after taking his daily post-operative half-mile walk as he recuperates at his son’s home in Denver.

Luke Johnson, Brianne Jones, Alicia Whiteside & Travis Newcomb the Saviours

“To me it was truly amazing that I was so lucky, because 99 percent of the time I am not in those circumstances, and I couldn’t have gotten that help. If I’d been driving, or on Quandary Peak, I wouldn’t have made it,” he said.

As it was, Best and his friend Carole Whitney of Denver were wading through the Hot Springs Pool after swimming laps, shortly after 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 29.

“My vision was funny, and Carole says I said something, and then I don’t remember anything until I was being helped onto the gurney and being wheeled into the ambulance,” he recalled.

In between were several tense minutes when no one knew what the outcome might be.

Whitney said Best went underwater, and at first she thought he was clearing his ears.

“But when my internal alarm sounded, I pulled him up and he was unconscious,” she recalled in an email sent to friends and family.

Whitney cried for help, and the pool’s lifeguards kicked into gear, recalled Travis Newcomb, assistant pool manager.

“Ali jumped in and made the rescue. She pulled him out, and we activated our emergency plan,” Newcomb said, referring to lifeguard Alicia Whiteside. “All the lifeguards went into action.”

While lifeguard Luke Johnson called 911, Newcomb grabbed the pool’s automated external defibrillator (AED) and ran to the lodge side of the pool. By the time he got there, lifeguard Brianne Jones was already performing rescue breathing on Best. A doctor who was at the pool at the time performed the chest compressions, and a nurse assisted.

“They went through a cycle of CPR, and then we made sure everything was dry and ready, and got the AED hooked up,” Newcomb said. Best had a pulse, but it was wildly irregular — just the circumstance the AED is made for. The team applied the shock treatment twice and the device successfully corrected Best’s heart rhythm.

“He took some breaths, he became conscious, and pretty soon he could answer questions correctly,” Newcomb said. Best actually sat up while the Glenwood Springs Fire Department’s emergency medical technicians were rolling in the gurney.

By this time, all eyes at the pool were on the dramatic life-and-death action.

“We were trying to block the scene, but it’s pretty out in the open,” Newcomb said. “Everybody could see what was happening. When he came to and was wide awake, then everybody clapped.

“It was pretty incredible to see, somebody who passed away, and he came back to life in front of us,” Newcomb added.

This was his second time to use the AED in a real-life situation, and it has worked both times, Newcomb said.

Best was out of the pool and breathing, but he was still in plenty of hot water.

Once he arrived at the Valley View Hospital emergency room, Dr. Steven Heilbrunn’s angiogram revealed that two of Best’s four main heart arteries were 99 percent blocked, while the other two were 60 to 70 percent blocked.

This was stunning news regarding a man who routinely runs three miles and does 50 to 70 push-ups and sit-ups a day, climbed a 14er this summer, has a low resting pulse and low blood pressure, and was pronounced by his doctor earlier this year as “one of the healthiest people in my practice.”

The blockage was so extreme, Whitney said, that Heilbrunn and his team elected to airlift Best to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction rather than risk the extra time and elevation gain of a flight to Denver.

“By 8:30 p.m. he was on the helicopter, and he went into surgery at 11 p.m.,” Whitney said.

The quadruple bypass surgery took four and a half hours.

After getting a call, Best’s son, Dr. Alan Best, a neuroradiologist, and daughter-in-law, Dr. Flora Waples, an emergency room doctor, drove over from their home in Denver, met up with Whitney in Glenwood Springs, and continued west to Grand Junction.

“At 9:30 the next morning, we were in his room talking to him,” Whitney said. “He was sitting up and we were having an alert and interesting conversation.”

Best spent two days in intensive care at St. Mary’s, and was discharged on Wednesday. He plans to spend the rest of November recuperating at his son’s home in Denver.

A small child’s birthday party normally isn’t news, but this was no ordinary birthday celebration for 3-year-old Kinlee Keltner, whose family celebrated her life and rejoiced in the divine favor and prayers that cover her.

Kinlee Keltner the Survivor

Last July, when Kinlee was 2, she nearly drowned in her family’s pool in Morehead. Her father, a trained CPR provider, used his skills for the first time to breathe his daughter back to life.

“It was just after supper on a Friday night,” said her dad, Brian Keltner.

“My dad, my girls — Taylee, Kessaney, Kinlee — and I decided to go for an evening swim. Minutes after entering the pool, Kinlee, right on cue, decided she needed to go potty,” he said.

Brian recalled how he took Kinlee to her mom, Sherridan, who took her to the bathroom. Meanwhile, Sherridan changed into her swimsuit. As the mother came out to the pool she asked, “Where’s Kinlee?”

“We thought she was with you,” they replied.

Sherridan immediately ran to the front door, thinking Kinlee had opened it and gone out into the road. But Kinlee had managed to open the heavy sliding glass door to the pool and entered the water on her own.

As her father began to climb out of the pool, he heard Kinlee’s grandfather yell, “No!”

Her grandfather pulled her from the bottom of the pool and placed her in her father’s arms.

“I began giving her CPR. At this point, Kinlee was blue, unresponsive and not breathing. As I began with chest compressions, white foam poured out of her mouth and eyes.

The fluid then turned amber-colored because blood was present.

All the while, Kinlee’s mother began to pray. When she saw her husband with the child, she dropped to the ground and crawled over to them, praying and holding Kinlee’s hand while Brian continued CPR.

An off-duty paramedic arrived within minutes and, finding a weak pulse in Kinlee, transported her to a waiting ambulance.

“We started praying together from the time we got in the police car to the time we arrived at the hospital,” Brian said. “We prayed without ceasing, and Sherridan asked everyone she saw, the doctors, the nurses, police officers, EMTs, even the helicopter pilot if they knew Jesus, and if they did she asked them to pray.”

Kinlee was given a breathing tube and induced into a coma to help her body rest while she was flown to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis.

Her parents could not join her in the helicopter, so they drove, praying all the way.

When they arrived at the hospital, barefoot and still in bathing suits, hospital staff escorted them to a waiting room and told them doctors would be with them soon.

“The doctors told us that Kinlee was a very sick little girl, her lungs were full of water and it appeared that she had been under water long enough to cause brain damage,” Brian Keltner said.

Doctors tried to prepare them for the possibility that Kinlee probably would not make it through the night, and if she did she might never be the same.

By that time, however, the Keltner family was part of a vast and growing prayer chain for Kinlee’s life.

“When she was pulled from that swimming pool Friday evening, lifeless, we began praying. We prayed without ceasing as a family.

“And as a family, I don’t mean only the Keltners, I mean our church family and hundreds and thousands of our brothers and sisters in Christ across the world,” Brian said.

After the report from the doctors, Brian and Sherridan began a different sort of prayer.

“We reached a point early Saturday morning where we prayed to God, ‘We know she is your child and you are just letting us borrow her, if you have to take her and that is your will, we will still love and obey you, but we believe this is not your will or your plan. We pray that you would heal her and let us keep our baby.’”

Over the course of the next few days, Kinlee’s condition steadily improved, and the following Tuesday she came home from the hospital.

“There was no medications, no pneumonia, no brain damage, nothing,” Keltner said.

Keltner spoke of uncertainty, of not always knowing what God’s plan was. He could not have known that his decision to learn CPR would one day save his own daughter’s life.

Less than a year after the accident, the Keltners gathered to celebrate Kinlee’s third birthday on Feb. 17.

Kinlee smiled, squirmed on her mother’s lap and seemed not to recognize the significance of this birthday. Her sisters and friends smiled for the camera, and dad shuttled to and from the buffet.

They are expecting a fourth child soon, another girl.

“We never take birthdays for granted anymore,” Sherridan said.

Kinlee’s father said the simplest gift, the ability to breathe, is the most profound.

“There are times I lay in bed and watch Kinlee as she sleeps. Listening to her breath, I just cry and smile knowing God has truly blessed us,” he said.

James Flippin is one of the most active 72-year-olds you’d ever meet. The walls of his home are similar to the hall of fame, covered with awards from the 71 marathons he’s run.

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He has remained fit all of his life, so it came as a surprise last week when he had a heart attack during his daily swim at the Northwest Family YMCA.

“When I would swim, I would be a little short of breath for about 10 minutes, but then it would correct itself,” Flippin said. “But on Nov. 15, after 10 minutes, that’s when I had my heart attack instead.”

James Flippin the Survivor

Linda Crabtree was the only lifeguard on duty at the time, and immediately called for help on her radio. With her quick reaction and the help of Melissa Betts and Elizabeth Janda, the three were able to pull Flippin out of the water.

“He’s 6 feet 4; I couldn’t keep him all the way out,” Crabtree said. “I kept his head out until the other two ladies came to help. Two of us pulled and one of us pushed.”

Once they got him on the pool deck, the three used the automated defibrillator to shock him back to life before the paramedics arrived.

Flippin’s daughter Lucy Johnston spoke of how stunned the doctors were that the women were able to save him: “They were in shock. They were walking around showing each other the papers from the defibrillator, and saying ‘I can’t believe this, he’s so lucky, you’ve got to thank whoever helped him’.”

“It’s great that it had that kind of an outcome, but I just feel like there were guardian angels all over,” Crabtree said.

To Flippin’s family, the real guardian angels are the women who saved his life.

“They’re angels. They were there at the perfect time to help our family,” Flippin’s wife Paula said. “There could not have been more perfect timing.”

Now, Flippin can run a few more marathons, adding to his massive wall collection. But most importantly, he can spend another Thanksgiving with his family.

“You can’t be more thankful than that, when you think there would’ve been an empty seat at the table. And now there’s not going to be one, thanks to those three women,” Paula added.

“It’s a true miracle, that’s the word for my dad. He’s a walking miracle,” Johnston said.

“I’m just grateful to be alive,” Flippin said.

Don Weir, 66, suffered a heart attack on Feb. 15 after swimming at the Indiana University Natatorium on the campus of Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis.

Weir, a father of seven and grandfather of four, had been working out in the pool for more than two decades before his life-changing ordeal, one he feels fortunate to have survived.

Feb. 15 was not a normal day for lifeguards. Although they undergo hours of training and practice to be ready to respond when someone in the water needs their help, they put those skills to the test in a real-world situation.

Five of them were involved in the rescue, not poolside, but in the locker room.

Weir had just finished swimming laps when he collapsed on the locker room floor. Another swimmer found him, and lifeguards rushed in to help.

CPR was performed on Weir, and an automatic defibrillator was used until paramedics arrived.

Weir was rushed to the hospital, where doctors were able to stabilize him.

On Monday, Weir was able to go back to the pool to thank those who saved him.

“I could hardly wait. I had no memory for five days,” he said. “They told me what happened. It was very important I get here.”

“Knowing that we kept a family together, it’s just unbelievable,” said lifeguard Christina Reitz. “You don’t think about that when you get up in the morning.”

Weir is still going through cardiac rehabilitation. He won’t be able to come back to swim until he gets clearance from a doctor, but Weir said he looks forward to returning to the pool.