By Bill Hendrick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CUMMING, Ga. — Trish and Sam Hungerbuhler of Cumming were sitting on the third row of wooden bleachers in a school gym watching sixth-graders play basketball when all of a sudden he slumped over, bumped her shoulder and “slithered” to the floor without uttering a noise.
Only 42 and in great shape, Hungerbuhler didn’t know what had hit him. Cheering one second, the next thing he experienced was a brief hallucination of “kids floating to the ceiling” and then he was out, as if someone had flipped off a light.
For all practical purposes, he was dead: and within a few minutes of becoming a victim of sudden cardiac arrest, which isn’t the same as a heart attack.
Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death in the U.S. About 295,000 people suffer them every year outside of hospitals, and only 8 percent survive, according to the American Heart Association.
Fortunately, Trish is an intensive care nurse at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and immediately started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Another nurse in the stands, Marty Bova-Banks, started chest compressions. And perhaps most fortunately, the Queen of Angels Catholic School in Roswell was equipped with an automated electronic defibrillator, or AED, which Hungerbuhler’s wife screamed for someone to fetch.
Without an electrical jolt, the brain cells of people who have sudden cardiac arrests start to die within a few minutes, usually before paramedics arrive, says Alison Ellison, a nurse at Children’s Healthcare, who heads a statewide program aimed at saving kids and adults whose hearts stop at schools.
She says AEDs are easy to use and similar to robots in that they tell people in an electronic voice exactly what to do. If a victim’s heart isn’t beating, the machine senses that, then tells the user to push a button that triggers an electrical jolt to get the organ pumping again.
In this case, it worked, and Hungerbuhler, a respiratory therapist at Children’s Healthcare, was joking with paramedics while hurtling toward St. Joseph’s Hospital.
“I felt no pain,” he says. “I had jogged with my wife two miles that week. I work out. But I still had a sudden cardiac arrest.”
Ellison says most people aren’t aware that there’s a difference between sudden cardiac arrest and heart attack, also called myocardial infarction. Heart attacks are caused by blockages that stop blood flow to the heart, while cardiac arrests occur due to an electrical malfunction, killing 134,000 people a year.
“I thought, ‘there’s no way my husband is here, dying,’ but at the same time I remembered everything I’m trained to do,” Trish says. “We got his heart going with the AED.”
“We are lucky,” Hungerbuhler says. “It’s great to be alive.”
Copyright 2012 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution