Around the Schools
Newly installed AED saves life at South Shore K-8 School
SPS employee John Santos is thankful that Seattle Public Schools – through The Heart of Seattle Schools Project – decided to install Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) in every school, administration building and on all 15 outside sports fields, at the beginning of this school year.
Earlier this week, that decision saved his friend’s life.
On Tuesday evening, Santos – an employee of South Shore K-8 School – and a group of friends were playing their usual weekly game of pick-up basketball in the South Shore gym when a member of the group suffered cardiac arrest and fell to the floor, unconscious.
In what Santos called “a true group effort,” one person called 911 while another started chest compressions.
Santos remembered that the District had recently installed the AEDs, left photo, and retrieved one from the South Shore rotunda area. Once the AED was attached, the victim was revived after receiving one shock.
After a few minutes, Seattle Fire Department paramedics arrived and took over treatment, then transported the victim to the hospital, where tests revealed he had a blocked artery.
The victim underwent an angioplasty, and “he’s going home from the hospital tonight,” Santos said Friday.
The best news of all? “His surgeons said he can probably be playing basketball again within a month,” Santos added.
Like the group effort to save a friend’s life, it took many partners to make the AED program a reality.
The Seattle School Board voted unanimously in 2010 to update the District emergency management plan to include a public access automated external defibrillator program, which includes training staff on how to use the AEDs at their schools.
SPS then collaborated with the Heart of Seattle Schools, a non-profit organization that includes the Seattle Seahawks and Sounders, local hospitals, Nick of Time Foundation and other school community partners, to develop a plan for implementing the program.
The goal is to educate and empower students, parents, coaches and members of the community in an effort to help reduce and prevent sudden cardiac arrest, said Darla Varrenti, whose family founded the Nick of Time Foundation to honor her son, Nick, who died after suffering cardiac arrest on the football field in 2004.
According to the Nick of Time Foundation, on average, a seemingly healthy young person suffers a sudden cardiac arrest every three days in the U.S. and it’s the leading cause of death in exercising young athletes. In most cases of sudden cardiac arrest, cardiac abnormalities are not detected, there are no warning signs, and unless a normal heart rhythm is restored within minutes, death is the end result.
Story by Teresa Wippel
Seattle Public Schools