By Hope Rurik
Ventura County Star
WASHINGTON — Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., shared a letter Wednesday from a 12-year-old sudden cardiac arrest survivor who collapsed on her way to gym class last month. She said an automated external defibrillator saved her life.
“This can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” Kylee Shea of Frisco, Texas, says in her letter.
Capps spoke at an event in support of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Coalition’s effort to put defibrillators in schools and communities to increase sudden cardiac arrest survival rates.
“It has local stories, but it’s of national importance,” Capps said.
Shea said the incident made clear to her that the defibrillators and trained people need to be in communities across the U.S.
“If that is what it says to me (may I remind you, I’m 12), what does it say to you?” she says.
Capps was honored at the event for her Teaching Children to Save Lives Act, aimed at teaching schoolchildren to administer CPR.
The congresswoman said she wants to give students the confidence to act in an emergency.
Stories like Shea’s were echoed throughout the evening in the Rayburn House Office Building as survivors told how CPR and defibrillators saved their lives.
Pamela Bonin of Indianapolis suffered sudden cardiac arrest when she was 26 and in what she said was the best shape of her life. She collapsed in a manager’s meeting, and her colleagues immediately began CPR. One performed compressions, one performed ventilation, one encouraged everyone to keep trying and one called 911.
Paramedics arrived after 15 minutes and used one of the defibrillators. Bonin’s parents and boyfriend were told at the hospital to expect the worst. Doctors said she might not recover and that if she did, she likely would have brain damage.
Bonin recovered fully.
When Bonin’s parents, Annette and Mark Feeney, also of Indianapolis, learned Bonin was in the hospital, they were told she hadaheart attack. The couple said they didn’t understand how that could happen to their healthy, athletic daughter.
“It didn’t seem natural for a young person like herself,” said her mother, a respiratory therapist.
Alice Lara, a registered nurse and CEO of the Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation, said sudden cardiac arrest differs from a heart attack, which usually occurs because of heart disease.
Sudden cardiac arrest is caused by an “electrical problem” when the heart just stops beating, she said. There generally are no symptoms or warning signs, and it can happen to anyone at any age.
Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., also was honored for performing CPR and using a defibrillator on a man who collapsed in an airport.
By passing bills encouraging CPR and defibrillator courses in school, the community as a whole benefits, Capps said.
“The younger we start with this pattern of behavior, the better off we all will be,” she said.
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