Quick Action Saves Life of Warsaw Student
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By David [email protected]
But thanks to the quick action of Warsaw Community Schools staff and a student, and an automated external defibrillator, Hall is alive to tell his story.
Hall was taking economics during summer school at Warsaw Community High School with teacher Todd Braddock. The day, June 29, began like every other morning, Hall recalled during an interview Monday afternoon.
“I remember I went to school that morning, and it was just like every morning. I walked to school, I got breakfast when I got there, and I was in the class,” he said. “And from what I remember, we were writing on the chalkboard, doing an activity because he (Braddock) was trying to make the class more interesting.”
Hall sat in the front row with his friend Owen Glogovsky and another student sitting behind him.
“From what I’ve heard, I told them I had chest pains and that I was feeling dizzy. And that’s all really that I remember in class,” Hall said.
Sanders said she was told that her son slumped down in his seat, tried to pull himself back up, fell out of his seat, vomited and aspirated.
“I don’t think it’s a day that I’ll ever forget,” WCS Head Nurse Tracey Akers said. “It was a Monday morning. I normally work at Edgewood, so I was working at the high school for summer school. And I got a phone call from the front office, and I also had Owen show up at my door at the same time, telling me that they needed some assistance in Mr. Braddock’s room because they had a student they thought was having a seizure.”
The nurse’s office is at the main entrance, and Braddock’s classroom is down a long hallway and up the stairs.
Akers was prepared to respond to a seizure. When she got to the room, Hall was not breathing.
“I could tell it was more than a seizure at that time,” she recalled. “So I immediately – thank goodness I had a team of people that listened to me – I said, ‘Call 911. Get the AED.’”
Glogovsky ran from the classroom and retrieved the AED, which was in front of the Performing Arts Center, down the stairs and through a hallway. CPR was immediately started.
“Of course, it seemed like an eternity to me before the first responders got there. I think it was about seven minutes that I was doing CPR on Connor,” Akers said.
Using the AED, she said they shocked Hall twice while waiting for the first responders to arrive.
“I don’t know how long they worked on him. I don’t think it was forever. They (the paramedics) were able to stabilize him,” Akers said.
Once the first responders arrived, Akers and everyone else were moved out of the room. Hall was transported to the hospital and Sanders was called. She met them at the hospital, but Hall wasn’t there very long before he was transported to Lutheran Hospital.
“I only heard him say ‘cardiac arrest.’ I was in a meeting, and I flew,” Sanders recalled. “Everything was going through my head. I think I ran every stop sign, every stop light until I hit (U.S.) 30. It was the only one I stopped at.”
“Fear,” she said, was going through her mind. “He’s my kid.”
Sanders said her son was a perfectly healthy kid and never experienced anything like that before that day. Since he had gone to middle school at Lakeview, Akers said she had never met Hall before that day.
“I’m very thankful that the teachers that were there, and the staff, the custodial staff, the administration staff, the switchboard – they all just pitched in and listened to what I had to say and helped me do what we could to do the necessary steps to keep Connor here with us,” Akers said.
During the Warsaw School Board meeting Monday night, Multi-Township EMS (now Lutheran EMS) Operations Division Chief Tony Doyle recognized Hall and all the people that played a part in saving Hall’s life.
“With the actions that went on that day – when the ambulance arrived, the hard work was done,” Doyle said. “They had utilized CPR. They defibrillated the person with the AEDs. When our crew, Cody (Manges) and Ron (Krueger), got there, along with the fire department, they did CPR for about another three minutes and then Connor regained pulses.”
At the time, no one knew what the outcome would be, Akers said. They didn’t know why he had the cardiac arrest.
“He is still not diagnosed,” Sanders said. “They said it was a form of Short QT Syndrome ... but it’s not exactly that.”
The doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told Sanders that Hall may be the “only unique person in the world to have it, and it might be a new form (of Short QT).”
While there, they also discovered Hall’s 21-year-old sister, Kyla Hall, has the condition. Sanders said only 80 people in the world have been diagnosed with Short QT Syndrome.
According to the Genetics Home Reference website, “Short QT syndrome is a condition that can cause a disruption of the heart's normal rhythm. In people with this condition, the heart muscle takes less time than usual to recharge between beats. The term ‘short QT’ refers to a specific pattern of heart activity that is detected with an electrocardiogram, which is a test used to measure the electrical activity of the heart. In people with this condition, the part of the heartbeat known as the QT interval is abnormally short.”
Hall spent nine days at Lutheran. They were home for nine days, and then spent almost two weeks at the Mayo Clinic.
When Hall goes back in October, doctors will take a 4 millimeter piece of his skin and convert it back to stem cells, she said. The stem cells will then be used to regrow Hall’s heart to study him that way.
“I feel all right right now, it’s just that sometimes it still hurts,” Hall said.
His condition is monitored with an Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator, and a download from his body is sent to the doctor at 2 a.m. every day. Hall also takes a beta blocker twice a day called Carvedilol.
Hall is back in school, with restrictions. “I can’t push, pull or lift more than 5 pounds and I leave class five minutes early,” he said.
Sanders said she was glad he was at school instead of home because she would have been at work when his cardiac arrest happened.
“That would have been horrible,” she said. “But the support of the community, it’s been awesome. I can’t thank everybody enough for everything.”
Akers thanked the K21 Health Foundation for providing the AEDs in all the schools in the county.
“I have been a nurse for 31 years. I don’t know that anything I’ve done can truly prepare me for what was going to happen that morning,” Akers said. “I do feel like all those years of being certified and recertified for CPR and AED, hoping that I would never have to use it, (helped). My expectation was that I was not going to having to do CPR on a 16-year-old. But hopefully, with this story, we can let people know that sudden cardiac arrest can happen to anyone.”
The more people that get trained in CPR, the better off the survival rate is for a person who needs it, she said.
Sanders said, “I just want to get the word out that a cardiac arrest doesn’t just happen to old people. Everybody thinks that it’s just ... old people. It doesn’t have an age limit. I would have never imagined this to happen in my life. It has no warning.”
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But thanks to the quick action of Warsaw Community Schools staff and a student, and an automated external defibrillator, Hall is alive to tell his story.
Hall was taking economics during summer school at Warsaw Community High School with teacher Todd Braddock. The day, June 29, began like every other morning, Hall recalled during an interview Monday afternoon.
“I remember I went to school that morning, and it was just like every morning. I walked to school, I got breakfast when I got there, and I was in the class,” he said. “And from what I remember, we were writing on the chalkboard, doing an activity because he (Braddock) was trying to make the class more interesting.”
Hall sat in the front row with his friend Owen Glogovsky and another student sitting behind him.
“From what I’ve heard, I told them I had chest pains and that I was feeling dizzy. And that’s all really that I remember in class,” Hall said.
Sanders said she was told that her son slumped down in his seat, tried to pull himself back up, fell out of his seat, vomited and aspirated.
“I don’t think it’s a day that I’ll ever forget,” WCS Head Nurse Tracey Akers said. “It was a Monday morning. I normally work at Edgewood, so I was working at the high school for summer school. And I got a phone call from the front office, and I also had Owen show up at my door at the same time, telling me that they needed some assistance in Mr. Braddock’s room because they had a student they thought was having a seizure.”
The nurse’s office is at the main entrance, and Braddock’s classroom is down a long hallway and up the stairs.
Akers was prepared to respond to a seizure. When she got to the room, Hall was not breathing.
“I could tell it was more than a seizure at that time,” she recalled. “So I immediately – thank goodness I had a team of people that listened to me – I said, ‘Call 911. Get the AED.’”
Glogovsky ran from the classroom and retrieved the AED, which was in front of the Performing Arts Center, down the stairs and through a hallway. CPR was immediately started.
“Of course, it seemed like an eternity to me before the first responders got there. I think it was about seven minutes that I was doing CPR on Connor,” Akers said.
Using the AED, she said they shocked Hall twice while waiting for the first responders to arrive.
“I don’t know how long they worked on him. I don’t think it was forever. They (the paramedics) were able to stabilize him,” Akers said.
Once the first responders arrived, Akers and everyone else were moved out of the room. Hall was transported to the hospital and Sanders was called. She met them at the hospital, but Hall wasn’t there very long before he was transported to Lutheran Hospital.
“I only heard him say ‘cardiac arrest.’ I was in a meeting, and I flew,” Sanders recalled. “Everything was going through my head. I think I ran every stop sign, every stop light until I hit (U.S.) 30. It was the only one I stopped at.”
“Fear,” she said, was going through her mind. “He’s my kid.”
Sanders said her son was a perfectly healthy kid and never experienced anything like that before that day. Since he had gone to middle school at Lakeview, Akers said she had never met Hall before that day.
“I’m very thankful that the teachers that were there, and the staff, the custodial staff, the administration staff, the switchboard – they all just pitched in and listened to what I had to say and helped me do what we could to do the necessary steps to keep Connor here with us,” Akers said.
During the Warsaw School Board meeting Monday night, Multi-Township EMS (now Lutheran EMS) Operations Division Chief Tony Doyle recognized Hall and all the people that played a part in saving Hall’s life.
“With the actions that went on that day – when the ambulance arrived, the hard work was done,” Doyle said. “They had utilized CPR. They defibrillated the person with the AEDs. When our crew, Cody (Manges) and Ron (Krueger), got there, along with the fire department, they did CPR for about another three minutes and then Connor regained pulses.”
At the time, no one knew what the outcome would be, Akers said. They didn’t know why he had the cardiac arrest.
“He is still not diagnosed,” Sanders said. “They said it was a form of Short QT Syndrome ... but it’s not exactly that.”
The doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told Sanders that Hall may be the “only unique person in the world to have it, and it might be a new form (of Short QT).”
While there, they also discovered Hall’s 21-year-old sister, Kyla Hall, has the condition. Sanders said only 80 people in the world have been diagnosed with Short QT Syndrome.
According to the Genetics Home Reference website, “Short QT syndrome is a condition that can cause a disruption of the heart's normal rhythm. In people with this condition, the heart muscle takes less time than usual to recharge between beats. The term ‘short QT’ refers to a specific pattern of heart activity that is detected with an electrocardiogram, which is a test used to measure the electrical activity of the heart. In people with this condition, the part of the heartbeat known as the QT interval is abnormally short.”
Hall spent nine days at Lutheran. They were home for nine days, and then spent almost two weeks at the Mayo Clinic.
When Hall goes back in October, doctors will take a 4 millimeter piece of his skin and convert it back to stem cells, she said. The stem cells will then be used to regrow Hall’s heart to study him that way.
“I feel all right right now, it’s just that sometimes it still hurts,” Hall said.
His condition is monitored with an Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator, and a download from his body is sent to the doctor at 2 a.m. every day. Hall also takes a beta blocker twice a day called Carvedilol.
Hall is back in school, with restrictions. “I can’t push, pull or lift more than 5 pounds and I leave class five minutes early,” he said.
Sanders said she was glad he was at school instead of home because she would have been at work when his cardiac arrest happened.
“That would have been horrible,” she said. “But the support of the community, it’s been awesome. I can’t thank everybody enough for everything.”
Akers thanked the K21 Health Foundation for providing the AEDs in all the schools in the county.
“I have been a nurse for 31 years. I don’t know that anything I’ve done can truly prepare me for what was going to happen that morning,” Akers said. “I do feel like all those years of being certified and recertified for CPR and AED, hoping that I would never have to use it, (helped). My expectation was that I was not going to having to do CPR on a 16-year-old. But hopefully, with this story, we can let people know that sudden cardiac arrest can happen to anyone.”
The more people that get trained in CPR, the better off the survival rate is for a person who needs it, she said.
Sanders said, “I just want to get the word out that a cardiac arrest doesn’t just happen to old people. Everybody thinks that it’s just ... old people. It doesn’t have an age limit. I would have never imagined this to happen in my life. It has no warning.”
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