By Ryan Knutson
Times-Picayune
Copyright 2007 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
TUALATIN, Ore. — The lean, muscular 16-year-old lacrosse player was hanging out at home in Tualatin just before midnight in late June when he felt as if his heart started beating out of his chest.
Moments later he collapsed with a thud on the bathroom floor. The culprit: a rare heart condition that can cause rapid heart rates or the heart to stop.
Despite being “clinically dead” for 19 minutes, Robby Richardson stunned paramedics and family when less than a day later, he emerged from a coma without a trace of brain damage. And, doctors say he’ll be fine to play lacrosse again.
“There are some people you get to and you’re right on top of them but once they’re gone, they’re gone,” said Charles Short, one of the first paramedics to arrive that night. Sometimes they recover, “but they’re not the same person again. Do you call that success? In the world of EMS you do, because we brought them back. But this is success, and this is very rare. I doubt I’ll see this again in my career.”
Richardson, who celebrated recently with Short and others who saved him, suffered from Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a silent but potentially deadly electrical impulse that hangs in the upper heart chamber and can cause the heart to short-circuit.
Medical studies have shown that less than 3 percent of the population suffers from the syndrome, and only in “extreme” cases is sudden cardiac death possible, according to a 1999 University of Virginia School of Medicine study.
Richardson somehow hung on through CPR and a 16-hour coma to make a full recovery.
“Someone told me that six (minutes in an unstable state) is bad, 20 is dead, and Robby was at 19,” said Richardson’s mother, Susan.
Yet he almost wasn’t so lucky.
It was just after 11 p.m. on Friday, June 29, when Richardson returned home from his girlfriend’s house with a bag of food from McDonald’s. His mom was watching a movie downstairs with a family friend and his 13-year-old brother was waiting for him in his upstairs bedroom.
By 11:45, Richardson finished eating, and he turned to his brother, Hayden, and asked him to feel his heart.
“He said his heart started really hurting a lot, and he said it was beating really really really fast,” Hayden said. He felt it and “it was like ‘boota boota boota boota’ . . . then he got up and walked into the bathroom and I heard this really loud noise.”
From downstairs, Richardson’s mother, Susan Richardson, and friend Bill Crist, heard “the loudest noise you could ever imagine.”
“I called his name and was running upstairs and he didn’t call back,” she said.
For the next eight minutes, Susan Richardson crammed herself into the small bathroom where her son lay motionless, pressed her hands against his chest and blew air into his lungs while Washington County 9-1-1 dispatcher Yvonne Harrell advised her over the phone
“There was a lot of fear,” Susan Richardson said. But she thought, “This child has so much more to live for, and doggone it, we’re going to get you going again. He hasn’t gone to college, he hasn’t gotten married, he hasn’t had a child.”
When Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue paramedics Bob Berdan, Short and four firefighters arrived, they pulled Richardson onto the beige carpet of the hallway and shocked him six times with a defibrillator during the next 20 minutes before taking him -- still unresponsive -- in an ambulance to Legacy Meridian Park Hospital, and later to Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center in Portland.
At the hospital, the prognosis was bleak.
“It could range from some mild impairment or it could be a devastating neurological injury,” said pediatric cardiologist Marc Le Gras, who treated Richardson.
For the next 16 hours, Richardson stayed in the intensive care unit with breathing tubes down his throat. He awoke around 4 p.m. Saturday, and doctors removed his breathing tubes. However, he was still too groggy for them to tell if he would recover.
On Sunday morning around 9, Susan Richardson returned to her son’s bedside after a few hours of rest and found him awake.
One week and two heart procedures later, Richardson was released from the hospital. He didn’t require major surgery or a pacemaker; after two months of monitoring he’ll probably be cleared to go back to lacrosse.
The paramedics and firefighters recently held a celebration for Richardson’s miraculous recovery at a Tualatin fire station.
“It just hasn’t hit me until right now,” said Richardson, an incoming junior at Tualatin High School, during the celebration. “I’m just thankful. It’s amazing.”