My life was saved by
CPR as well. I also went twenty full
minutes with no heartbeat. In these
pages, I have since reported on an individual surviving two and one half hours
using CPR. What this all means is that
it sufficient to establish an rhythmic pulse on the heart in order to simply
pulse the blood pressure. This alone shifts
the blood about enough to get oxygen rich fluid moving around every cell. That turns out to be good enough to preserve
tissue for hours.
All this means that it
is plausible to even do emergency surgery to clear badly obstructed arteries to
restart the heart.
Today most heart attack
victims are still generally robust individuals quite able to handle invasive surgery
and survive so the mere maintenance of CPR right away is pretty certain to succeed.
Right now the current
high death rates are derived from the failure to provide timely CPR and waning
medical ignorance itself. The latter is
been disabused and I suspect that my particular case may well have helped
because it was so early and so clear.
Now we have a mass of supporting cases.
Let us make it clear
for all lay people. When confronted by a
collapsed victim:
1
Call 911 and get help on the way.
2
Roll the victim over to chest up. Then apply with both hands a pressure push
over the heart. Develop a pulsing action and try to arc over the chest on your
knees to use you own torso to develop the thrust. Otherwise you will tire too quickly. Be careful not to push too hard either as a
broken rib is not helpful and this is a serious risk with the elderly. You have now had time to settle yourself and
focus your mind.
3
Medical help will arrive in
minutes. If you insist, take a ten
second break to blow air into the lungs although that appears to be meaningless
until the heart is restarted.
4
Make sure the medical team understands
that you have provided full duration CPR so it gets into the record. It is too easy for someone to argue for
actual failure based on ignorance and your task is to ensure that does not
happen.
5
Do not count on other people’s heroics
Just that is good enough
to save lives.
In the critical
minutes, saving a life meant CPR
by GAIL
JOHNSON on OCT 23, 2013
VANCOUVER
ACTOR SONJA Bennett has prepared for a lot of roles over the years, but
she admits that she wasn’t ready for one she took on in a harrowing real-life
drama.
On
March 18, Bennett had just gotten off a plane in Los Angeles with a long-time
friend and collaborator, local film producer Kevin Eastwood. (Author’s note:
Eastwood is my brother-in-law.) The two were headed to meetings for a movie
script she has written called Preggoland. After taking a shuttle from the
airport to the nearby car-rental hub, they had just started walking from one
kiosk to another when things took a drastic turn.
“Kevin
clutched his heart and took two sharp inhalations and then just fell forward
onto the cement,” Bennett says during an interview in a Commercial Drive coffee
shop. “I didn’t spend very long asking, ‘Are you okay?’ Once he didn’t respond,
I called 911 right away.”
Bennett,
then seven months pregnant, didn’t know that the 36-year-old Eastwood had just
experienced sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). Not to be confused with a heart
attack, where blood flow to the heart is blocked, SCA is the unexpected
stoppage of heart function and loss of breathing and consciousness. It usually
results from an electrical disturbance in the heart that disrupts its pumping
action and prevents blood from flowing to the brain, lungs, and other organs.
When the heart stops, the lack of oxygenated blood can cause death or permanent
brain damage within four to six minutes. Less than 10 percent of victims live
through such an event, according to the Canadian Association of Emergency
Physicians (CAEP).
The
next few minutes were nerve-racking for Bennett and critical for Eastwood’s
survival.
She
couldn’t tell the 911 dispatcher where she was. He wanted an address and all
she could say was that they were about 10 minutes away from the airport. He
kept telling her to relax and to listen for breaths.]\
“I
said, ‘He is not breathing,’ ” Bennett recalls. The dispatcher instructed
Bennett to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Panic-stricken and unsure of
exactly how to proceed, she cradled her cellphone on her shoulder and began
pressing down on Eastwood’s chest while the operator talked her through it.]
“It
was compressions, compressions, compressions,” she says. “It felt like it went
on forever.”]
Eventually,
two passersby came to help, and an ambulance arrived. The four paramedics took
one look at Eastwood and leaped into action.
“At
the speed of light, they ripped off his clothes and were using defibrillators,”
Bennett says. Eight shocks later, one of the paramedics said, “We’ve got a
pulse,” and the ambulance headed to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
There, Eastwood was treated with therapeutic hypothermia, in which the body’s
temperature is lowered and the patient is put in a drug-induced coma before
gradually being warmed up. There are no guarantees, but the procedure gives the
body and the brain the best chance of recovering following SCA. After several
days, Eastwood awoke. He spent 10 days in hospital, had a defibrillator
implanted in his chest, and has since made a full recovery.
Waiting
for him to come out of the coma, however, was agonizing for his family and
friends. Bennett had the added burden of wondering whether she could have done
more in those first few minutes after his collapse.
“I
am so thankful that Kevin is all right, because if he had woken up and not been
himself, I would spend my entire life going, ‘If only I’d started [CPR] a
minute sooner,’ ” she says. “I didn’t start doing CPR for about two minutes,
whereas now I would have started CPR first, then called 911, or done them
simultaneously.
“I
arranged for a CPR course as soon as I got back to Vancouver,” she adds. (Many
of Eastwood’s friends joined her.)
Cindy
Lund Chow, chief learning officer of St. John Ambulance’s B.C. and Yukon
branch, describes CPR as a life skill.
“CPR
is a life-saving tool,” Chow says in a phone interview along with Chris Chan, a
first-aid instructor and the organization’s director of business intelligence.
“It’s not just something you want to think about if you have elderly parents or
because it’s required for the workplace. Cardiac arrest is something that can
happen to anyone. Doing training is going to enable you to save a life, and
that life is most likely going to be of someone you love.”
That’s
because about 80 percent of SCAs occur in the home, Chan notes. “If you’re with
that person, you are the one who has the ability to keep them alive,” he says.
Just
as crucial as performing CPR, Chan emphasizes, is knowing how to use automated
external defibrillators (AEDs), which are becoming increasingly common in
public spaces such as ice rinks, shopping malls, and airports. (Many CPR
courses include instruction on the use of AEDs.)
“The
AED is just as important as CPR,” Chan says. “They go together like peanut
butter and jam. CPR is very important, but CPR is not going to restart the
heart. Research shows that for every minute of delay in defibrillation,
survival decreases by seven to 10 percent even if CPR is happening.
“Sudden
cardiac arrest doesn’t discriminate,” he adds. “Anybody of any age can have a
SCA. You can be super healthy and still have sudden cardiac arrest. It happened
to one of our instructors, who was driving at the time. A friend of mine was
28, and he actually died. He had CPR, but what was missing was AED. Because of
that, he didn’t survive.”
Many
people who witness cardiac arrest, though, don’t perform CPR. CPR is initiated
in only about 25 percent of SCA cases in Canada, according to CAEP. Possible
reasons include bystanders fearing that attempting CPR will make things worse
or that they could hurt the victim. However, anyone who tries to help someone
who is unconscious is protected from liability by Good Samaritan laws. Some
people don’t want to perform the recommended mouth-to-mouth resuscitation that
normally accompanies compressions out of fear of transmissible diseases. (Some
schools teach compressions only.) Still others simply don’t know what cardiac
arrest looks like.
Signs
of SCA include sudden collapse, lack of pulse, no breathing, and loss of
consciousness. Sometimes symptoms precede the grave condition, including
fatigue, fainting, blackouts, dizziness, chest pain, shortness of breath,
weakness, heart palpitations, or vomiting. But it often occurs without any
warning.
And
CPR and defibrillation must be delivered quickly. “If somebody is not breathing
or moving or having any signs of life, you can assume it’s cardiac arrest, and
you can do something to help that person,” Chan says.
Everyone
should be trained in CPR, according to the CAEP. “All Canadians should respond
and provide chest compressions (with or without mouth-to-mouth ventilation)
whether they are trained or not, when an adult, child or infant suddenly
collapses,” it stated in a 2012 position statement on bystander CPR. The
organization also recommended that compulsory CPR training be implemented in
high schools: “CPR education should be a prerequisite for a graduating student
to earn a high school diploma.”
Bennett
says she plans on refreshing her CPR skills regularly, as is recommended. “Half
of it is knowing CPR and half of it is having the confidence to do it,” she
says. “But even if you’re not sure you’re doing it right, just do it. Anything
is better than nothing.
“I
did what I could, not in any heroic fashion; I was terrified,” she adds. “The
best thing was hearing Kevin’s voice after he woke up….The moral of the story
is get your CPR training.”
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