Defibrillator project helps prevent another avoidable death
Stories like this get to Joe Lemel every time.
During a holiday basketball tournament at West Allis Central last month, Michael Saxby experiOn enced sudden cardiac arrest and collapsed on the court. Over the next 9 minutes, a series of dominoes fell that allowed the life of the Waunakee sophomore to be saved. He was quickly given CPR and then his heart was jump-started by an AED (automated external defibrillator) before he was taken to nearby Children’s Hospital in Wauwatosa.
Thursday, Saxby went home and Lemel, watching a television news account of the story, felt a sense of fulfillment.
“It’s my life’s mission,” he said. “It’s what I live for now. It’s indescribable to understand or for me to express the meaningful sense that I have when somebody was given back their life, (something) that my son was never given the chance for.”
Adam Lemel was a 17-yearold student at Whitefish Bay and helped the Blue Dukes win state team tennis titles in 1997 and ’98. He also played basketball, and it was around this time in 1999 that he collapsed while playing a junior varsity game and died. He suffered sudden cardiac arrest, a condition that in his case occurred because his ventricles could not pump blood into the body.
Joe Lemel was there and he watched as a trainer applied CPR. By the time an AED
reached Adam, it was too late. Friday was his birthday.
“When it finally showed up, they applied three shocks and I stood witness to a flat screen, knowing that my son had died,” he said.
From that tragedy came Project ADAM. The nonprofit organization helps schools and communities get the equipment and training necessary to prevent sudden cardiac deaths. Project ADAM’s reach now stretches to schools throughout Wisconsin and across the country.
West Allis Central has three AEDs in the building thanks to the program, and all the necessary parties knew what to do when the emergency occurred. As a result, Molly and Chris Saxby took home their son last week and soon he’ll resume his life as usual.
A tragedy was averted and hopefully a lesson was learned: schools need AED devices in the building and a plan of action in place to deal with sudden cardiac arrest. Really, how can they afford not to? “The fact that the 16-year-old survived isn’t because the paramedics were so close, it’s because the chain of survival was in place because the first responders can never be the first ones to respond,” Lemel said.
“We need processes in place in the school. We need to recognize the fact that kids do suffer cardiac arrest. It’s not something that’s just for old people. We have survival stories of kids as young as 3 years old.”
Lemel learned after his son’s death that if a person isn’t revived after the first couple of minutes of sudden cardiac arrest, his or her chances of survival drop greatly. Key to that treatment is having an AED device near within that time frame.
“In cardiac arrest, CPR will maintain you but it won’t bring you back,” Lemel said. “You need to apply that shock to shock your heart back.”
Michael Saxby doesn’t remember much of his ordeal. One moment he was playing chess on the bus ride to the game and the next he was waking up in the hospital.
He was playing in a junior varsity game at the Ab Nicholas Scholarship Foundation Holiday Hoops Classic when he collapsed. Trainer Scott Barthlama, just a few feet away, reached Saxby within seconds and applied CPR until paramedics arrived.
The paramedics continued CPR and used an AED on Saxby before transporting him to Children’s Hospital. All things considered, it went smoothly.
“Our coach just said they worked without even talking to each other, they just did it,” Molly Saxby said. “They shocked him once and he came back and then they did a little more CPR and took him out of the door. … I just kept saying it was a nightmare to look at the other end of the court and see them pumping his chest.”
This nightmare, however, has a happy ending. Michael Saxby’s athletic career may be done but his life goes on.
He was diagnosed with a genetic heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease in which a portion of the heart muscle is enlarged. It is the No. 1 cause of sudden death in young athletes.
Saxby, however, still became a statistic: He is approximately the 120th person documented nationwide whose life has been saved thanks to Project ADAM.
But according to Lemel, some school districts still don’t have plans in place or AEDs available.
Is your school in one of those districts? Those schools need a spark, someone to lead a charge that others have not. Maybe that person is you.
“It takes a champion,” Lemel said. “You would think a principal or someone with authority in any school would go, ‘We need this,’ but it’s just not what is happening, so it’s a parent, in many cases it’s a school nurse. Somebody needs to rise to the surface.”
For more information on Project ADAM, go to bit.ly/1QGzK7B, email ProjectAdam@chw.org or call (414) 266-3889.