Tag: AED

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Delaware Athletic Trainers help to Save Life

The first thing Bob Beron heard were the screams for help.

Something was happening in the bleachers at Smyrna High but the Caesar Rodney High athletic director had no idea what.

“I just noticed fans that were frantically running out of the stands,” said Beron. “I was trying to figure out what was going on.”

At about the same time, Jim Tucker heard the screams, too.

But the CR trainer was across the field at Smyrna. He was on the sidelines of the boys’ soccer state tournament doubleheader being played that night.

“I heard my name, and I thought there was a player down,” said Tucker. “I started onto the field. I took about five steps out there and I’m looking around — I can’t see anybody down. I’m watching the game the whole time and I didn’t see anybody go down.

“Then I heard somebody say, ‘Tucker, we need an AED over here.’”

What happened next occurred in the blink on an eye — probably no more than several minutes.

A handful of people — some who didn’t know each other, and still don’t — acted on instinct and adrenaline to save a stranger’s life.

Because of their actions, one man — the grandfather of a soccer player from another school — got to wake up the next morning, Nov. 12, still very much alive.

The man was lucky to have Beron nearby when he had his heart attack in the stands.

Beron, who is in his first year as CR’s athletic director, had taught a CPR course to high school students for about nine years.

Still, he had never administered it in a real crisis, with a human being’s life on the line.

But, when he heard the screams for help, because of his training, Beron ran into the stands to see what he could do.

Beron saw a man laying on the 12-inch wide, bench-style aluminum bleachers. He also saw a woman — he still doesn’t know who she was — administering CPR.

The man was completely unresponsive.

“Basically, he was showing zero signs of life,” said Beron.

Meanwhile, both Tucker and the Wilmington Charter trainer had sprinted across the field with their AEDs.

The acronym stands for Automated External Defibrillators, a portable device that not only diagnoses cardiac arrhythmias but can then be used to shock the heart back into an effective rhythm.

There was a time when nobody had the device. Now they’re everywhere, says Beron.

“We have at least five in our school,” he said.

Tucker, who says he was basically an observer in the situation, said that, as soon as the AED was in place, it said to administer a shock.

When he was high-school aged, Tucker worked in an emergency room. He’d been been involved in any numbers of critical situations.

He said there was no doubt the man was in a life-or-death crisis.

“He was gone,” said Tucker. “The machine is hooked on him and he’s basically flat-lined. There’s nothing in this guy. He’s not breathing.”

At the time, people were holding the man in place so he didn’t fall off the bench. That would have been dangerous if they were still in contact with him when the shock was given.

Tucker just remembers telling everyone to stand clear.

The first jolt, however, didn’t get the man’s heart back in rhythm.

Beron said they had to do two more minutes of chest compressions before giving him another shock.

This time it worked.

That’s when the ambulance crew took over,

“By the time he left the stadium, he was coherent and talking to the EMTs,” said Tucker. “I’ve never seen that before. His recovery was remarkable.”

And, just like that, the ordeal for everyone at the stadium was over. The games resumed and people went back to watching.

Life went on.

Tucker said he couldn’t even tell you how long it lasted.

“You know, it’ really hard to say, because I never really looked at my watch,” said Tucker. “And it seems like forever when you’re doing those kinds of things. But it was just a matter of a few minutes, probably.”

For Beron, what had just happened didn’t sink in until later.

One minute he was watching a soccer game. The next, he held a human’s life in his hands.

“Basically, when it happened, I felt like my training just stepped right in,” said Beron, who had received his training through the American Red Cross.

“Everything that I practiced, everything that I taught the kids in class, everything that I’d been taught to do. … it literally didn’t hit me until later on that night when I got home with my wife.

“I was driving home — it’s silent, just me in the car driving back from Smyrna,” he continued. “I’m like, ‘Man…’

“I don’t want to take all the credit … but the combination of me and some others, we just helped to save someone’s life.”

Odds & ends

•The Wesley College men’s basketball team will get a rare chance to face a Division I program when it faces Elon today at 2 p.m. in North Carolina. The Phoenix are members of the Colonial Athletic Association with Delaware.

•Dover High hosts rival Caesar Rodney in boys’ basketball on Tuesday at 7:15 p.m. The Senators won both last year’s meetings.

•William Penn’s Marvin Dooley (Blue) and Middletown’s Mark Delpercio (Gold) will be the head coaches for the 61st annual Blue-Gold All-Star Football Game. This will be Delpercio’s third time as Gold head coach and the first time for Dooley, who played in the 1987 game.

•Delaware officially announced the signing of Dover High’s Jordan Hutchins to a baseball scholarship this week. Blue Hen coach Jim Sherman had this to say about the Senators’ senior infielder: “Jordan is another extremely athletic player with a ton of upside, We have been following Jordan for a number of years now and he has really progressed every year. He is an explosive runner and he has developed into a very good gap-to-gap type hitter, both of which play very well on our field. We look for great things out of Jordan here at UD.”

•Penn State defensive end Carl Nassib, who won the Lombardi Trophy on Wednesday as the top lineman in college football, is the older brother of Delaware sophomore defensive end John Nassib. Not only do both Nassibs play the same position but both wear jersey No. 95.

•It was somewhat ironic that coach K.C. Keeler’s Sam Houston State squad faced Colgate in the FCS playoffs on Saturday. Colgate, of course, was the team that Delaware beat, 40-0, to win the 2003 I-AA national championship when Keeler was coaching the Blue Hens.

Reach sports editor Andy Walter at walter@newszap.com

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

FROM THE SPORTS EDITOR: Teamwork saves life of spectator

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Dallas Athletic Trainer Saves referee’s life

The last thing Sam McCright remembers, it was midway through the second quarter Monday night and he was standing at the 20-yard line at Bob Ramos wasn’t sure what had happened to McCright when he saw him collapse. The 68-year-old athletic trainer coordinator for Lakewood Orthopaedics in Dallas works football games for Gateway. Visits campus twice a week, where his gentle, professorial demeanor has earned him a nickname.

Gateway Charter Academy in southwest Dallas. He’d just put a whistle in his mouth, ready to blow the start of another play, when he fell face first into the turf.

And that was just about the last thing Sam McCright ever did.

All that prevented it was the quick, thorough work of an athletic trainer on site, a nurse out of the stands and an automated external defibrillator, or AED.

“Otherwise,” an emergency room doctor told McCright, “you wouldn’t be with us.”

Here’s what McCright, a 71-year-old retired pharmaceutical rep from Terrell, was up against: Nine of 10 victims of sudden cardiac arrest die. SCA isn’t the same as a heart attack, which damages heart muscle and can lead to cardiac arrest and death. SCA survivors often return to normal lives. But because heart stoppage eventually leads to brain damage, SCA victims must receive treatment within three to five minutes. For every minute victims go untreated, their odds of survival are reduced 7 to 10 percent.

“Prof,” they call him.

Ramos was working the Gateway-Wortham game Monday because it’d been postponed after last weekend’s rains. When Ramos and a nurse from the Wortham side, Rosanne Howard, reached McCright, the referee was breathing but unconscious. Howard began chest compressions while Ramos performed mouth-to-mouth. No response. McCright was, at that point, clinically dead. So Ramos cut away his shirt and called for an AED.

As it happens, not only did Ramos have one on his bench, Wortham had an AED, too. Since the 80th Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 7 in 2007, public schools are required to have at least one AED on campus.

Ramos and Howard put the paddles on McCright and let the machine do its work. A charge restored a faint pulse. The AED directed continued CPR, which Ramos and Howard did until McCright’s color returned and his breathing improved.

Ramos worked so diligently — “Prof never looked up,” Gateway coach Walter Miller said — he didn’t notice the arrival of the EMTs, who then took over, transporting McCright to Methodist Charlton Medical Center.

McCright came to in the back of the ambulance, where EMTs told him what had happened.

One of the other officials called McCright’s wife, Karen, who was back home in Terrell watching TV with their daughter, Stacy. They don’t go to the games because they don’t like hearing the abuse an official takes. Karen thought the caller was kidding. Her husband was a little overweight, sure, but he’d always been in good shape. Great reports on check-ups. He’s worked thousands of sporting events, in fact, and except for once when he and a football player accidentally collided, giving him a concussion, it’s been a pretty easy gig.

Still, her last words when he went out the door Monday were the same as usual.

“Don’t get hurt.”

When she got the call Monday, she was told Sam had had a heart attack. It wasn’t until she and Stacy arrived at the emergency room that they were told his heart had actually stopped. His nose, probably broken by the fall, was purple and swollen. But his sense of humor remained intact.

“I’m sorry I took you away from Dancing with the Stars,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ramos’ night wasn’t even over. Once the EMTs took McCright away, other patients took his place. Ramos treated one player for a concussion, another for injured ribs and a third for an ankle sprain.

Even though AEDs are required at all Texas public schools, athletic trainers aren’t. Most of the bigger schools employ full-time ATs, but many of the smaller public and private schools don’t. Sometimes it’s a matter of money, sometimes ignorance. Just last week, the National Athletic Trainers Association released figures indicating nearly two-thirds of high schools nationally don’t have full-time ATs and almost 30 percent have no access to AT services whatsoever.

Texas is ahead of the national curve when it comes to the availability of ATs, says Dave Burton, director of Lakewood Orthopaedics. But every kid deserves proper medical care, and until we have it, Texas remains behind where it should be.

Miller, 65, is like most old coaches: For most of his career, he served as his own athletic trainer. He’s been trained in CPR, as all coaches are, but his experience was no match for what he witnessed Monday.

“Prof,” Miller said, “he’s my hero.”

The feeling among the McCrights is pretty much the same, to say the least. They got to meet their hero — “You’re my blood brother now,” Sam told Ramos — at Methodist Charlton, where Sam will undergo bypass surgery Friday to repair two arteries blocked 100 percent. In that hospital room Thursday, everyone laughed a little and cried a little and talked for an hour or more about what was remembered and what wasn’t, the actions of an AT and a nurse, a death and life again.

They also heard a story Miller told me, that at the moment McCright’s heart failed, it started raining on the field.

And when McCright’s eyes opened again, the rain stopped.

“I’m glad I saw the miracle,” is how Miller put it, “but I never want to see it again.”

You couldn’t have found anyone in Sam McCright’s hospital room Thursday who would have argued about the divine nature of Sam’s survival. But miracles come in many shapes and forms. Sometimes they even answer to nicknames.

As for Sam, he says he’s done with officiating, at least on the field. By order of the wife.

When I asked Karen why, she said, “How would I know the school would have one of those machines there? How would I be lucky enough to have . . . ”

She paused a moment, pointing at Prof.

“No, not lucky,” she said. “Blessed is a better word.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/high-schools/headlines/20151029-sherrington-high-school-football-referee-s-life-saved-by-a-trainer-nurse-in-the-stands-and-a-texas-law.ece

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Kentucky Athletic Trainer Uses AED to save life

The start of the high school sports season brings a reminder about the dangers student-athletes can face and how critical it is to take action quickly.

On Tuesday, a team playing in a soccer tournament in Northern Kentucky almost saw the unthinkable happen. A boy playing for Walton Verona had what’s being called a cardiac event after a game against Holy Cross.

As WLWT News 5’s Todd Dykes explains, athletic officials scrambled for a device that may have saved the young man’s life.

“It was right at the end of the last game,” Dr. Bill Dickens, the leader of Calvary Christian School, said. “It was already dark, getting dark, and a young man went down with a cardiac situation. Our athletic director and the trainer that we have, provided for us by St. Elizabeth, responded.”

Calvary Christian hosted the tournament game in question.

Fortunately, the school has an automated external defibrillator, or AED, which an athletic trainer used on the boy until an ambulance arrived.

“According to EMTs, the fact that they responded with the AED, CPR, all that stuff – the young man survived,” Dickens said.

“Awesome, awesome. What a save,” Laura Batson said when Dykes told her what happened.

“Maybe this is a sign,” Batson added. “You getting ahold of me and, yeah, something good has happened.”

The reason Batson cares so much about Calvary Christian’s use of an AED to help a child in need is because the medical device was donated to the school by an organization she founded after a family tragedy.

“Cameron passed in October of 2010,” Batson said.

Batson’s son, Cameron, died of an undiagnosed heart problem while practicing soccer on another soccer field in Kenton County.

As a result, Laura started Cameron’s Cause, a nonprofit that started donating heart defibrillators to as many schools as possible, including Calvary Christian.

“It is so important because you only have three to five minutes to get that on the victim,” Batson said.

Dickens showed Dykes the kind of AED used to help the soccer player from Walton Verona, saying, “I guess it’s dummy-proof. You hook it up and it tells you whether to administer a shock or not.”

He’s grateful Cameron’s Cause was able to raise the money necessary to donate the AED to Calvary Christian.

“We’re a small school and don’t have a lot of funds available for things like that,” Dickens said. “But thankfully we were included in that donation along with other schools and that allowed us to have this piece of equipment.”

Calvary Christian’s athletic director, Matt Morrison, credits the trainer who used the AED for reacting quickly.

“I truly believe that she saved a young man’s life,” Morrison said.

Scott Helton is a certified athletic trainer and clinic manager at St. Elizabeth Sports Medicine, which provides athletic training services to several schools in Northern Kentucky.

“The thing we’re most happy with is the training that our staff has,” Helton said. “The training we have as certified athletic trainers came into play here.”

In addition to the trainer and the AED, Calvary Christian’s Bill Dickens believes a higher power was also at play.

“The way we believe, God was actively involved there,” Dickens said.

Laura Batson agrees with what’s behind it all.

“I mean, it’s awesome,” Batson said. “It’s showing that we’re doing the work. We’re doing the work that God has put me here to do.”

So far, Cameron’s Cause has donated 60 defibrillators to Tri-State schools.

Since each unit can cost up to $1,200, Laura Batson says donations are always welcome.

For more information: Cameron’s Cause – cameronscausefoundation.org

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.wlwt.com/news/teen-recovering-after-cardiac-event-at-nky-soccer-tournament/34852104

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In summer heat, athletic trainers call for safety measures

A thousand-dollar expenditure for an automated external defibrillator (AED) could mean the difference between life and death for some young athletes, a cost that one Little Rock, Arkansas high school knows too well.

A heart abnormality caused 16-year-old Antony Hobbs to collapse during his Parkview High basketball game in 2008. Hobbs was unaware of his condition, likely present since birth. Though an ambulance responded, he died about an hour after an otherwise ordinary game tip-off.

The outcome differed starkly two years later when another Parkview player, Chris Winston, collapsed on court with the same condition. A new state law, named for Hobbs, had required that AEDs be placed in schools, and AED use led to Winston’s survival.

While Arkansas’ policy followed tragedy, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine are asking schools to proactively take measures to protect kids before summer training for fall sports.

“We’ve mostly been reactionary in terms of our preparations,” said Jonathan Drezner, a University of Washington sports medicine physician and co-author of an editorial in the Journal of Athletic Training that calls for emergency practice implementation in schools. “It shouldn’t be that a kid has to die for the school to be prepared,” he said.

In 2014, 11 high school football players died during practice or competition, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. Five deaths were a result of brain injury or cervical fracture. Six were the result of heart conditions, heat stroke or water intoxication.

“AEDs are a relatively inexpensive way of saving a life,” said Doug Casa, CEO of the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute, which works to prevent sudden deaths in sports. Casa authored NATA’s “best practice” guidelines in 2012 for school sporting events.

In addition to calling for AEDs onsite, the guidelines advise schools to develop heat acclimatization programs, with phase-ins of equipment, along with gradual increases in intensity and duration of exercise. Football practice in early August is the most dangerous time for heat strokes in young athletes, according to the organization.

The recommendations also call for schools to coordinate their emergency plans with local emergency services.

Nationwide adoption of the guidelines has proven slow, however. Only 14 of 50 states, for example, meet NATA “best-practices” regarding heat.

And according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, only 19 states have laws mandating AEDs in at least some schools.

Jason Cates, an athletic trainer for Cabot Public Schools in Cabot, Arkansas, was among those who worked for changes after Hobbs’ death to ensure the safety of Arkansas’ student-athletes. For districts with limited budgets, he suggests enlisting support from local booster clubs and parent-teacher organizations, and holding fundraisers during games.

To schools that install new turf or expensive video screens instead of safety measures, Cates says, “If you can afford to do that stuff, you can afford athletic health care.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/07/23/us-health-kids-sports-idUKKCN0PX1XN20150723