Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
By SUSAN WEICH
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
COTTLEVILLE, Mo. — Carolyn Holt is pretty lucky for a woman who had a heart attack.
Holt, 64, of St. Charles County, was driving south on Mid Rivers Mall Drive near St. Charles Community College about 6 p.m. Friday when she went into cardiac arrest. Her vehicle crossed over three lanes in the heavy rush hour traffic without hitting anyone, then came to rest gently against a guardrail in the northbound lanes.
Four people stopped to help her. Two of them were registered nurses. A third was Steve Earle, who makes a living selling automatic external defibrillators, the devices used to shock a patient’s heart into a regular rhythm.
“It was kind of crazy luck that it was me with the device and two nurses that were three of the first four on the scene,” Earle said.
Earle grabbed the defibrillator he uses for demonstrations and rushed to help.
The two nurses -- Mary Blome and a woman identified only as Laurie -- started cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but Holt wasn’t breathing. Earle and one of the nurses hooked Holt up to the defibrillator and delivered a shock. Holt got a pulse back, and St. Charles County paramedics rushed the woman to the hospital.
She underwent surgery Tuesday to have an automatic internal cardiac defibrillator implanted and is expected to fully recover.
Earle said that even though he has been selling the devices for 2 1/2 years for Cardiac Science, a company based in Bothell, Wash., he has never used one in an emergency before.
“Even though I talk about them every day, I was still incredibly nervous and shaken,” Earle said. “It was a stressful situation.”
Earle knows the statistics involving sudden cardiac arrest all too well. The survival rate for sudden cardiac arrest is 5 percent.