Courtesy:
Medical Miracles, Readers Digest 1981. November.
From the
frontiers of science and the far horizons of personal courage, these stories of
medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm your faith in the awesome powers of
the human spirit. Dramatic victories and human triumphs.
Selected and
edited by the editors of Readers Digest
“Help!
The man needs help!” The frantic
cry shattered the Sunday afternoon serenity on Seattle’s Jackson park golf
course. Form the elevated fifth tee,
four startled hi school boys saw tow youngsters hovering over the crumpled form
of a man on a nearby fairway.
“Let’s go!”
shouted 18-year –old Craig Larson.
Sprinting downhill to the stricken victim, the four boys saw that he had
turned dark blue—obviously from lack of air.
One of those who had shouted—15year-old Neil Ratty, a boy scout—was
already trying to tip the man’s head back to open a clear mouth-to-lungs
airway. Craig flopped to the ground and
shoved his forearms beneath the base of the man’s neck so that the others could
tilt his head far enough back to assure an open air passageway past the
tongue. Mike Merkley, 17, quickly but
carefully looked at the man’s chest and felt the air in front of his nose and
mouth for any signs of breath none! The man was then given four quick
breaths. Pressing fingers gently to the
side of the man’s neck, Mike sought any indication of a pulse. Again, none!
Technically, the man was ‘dead.’
But the boys
knew that only about a minute had passed since his collapse, and that the human
brain can usually survive about four to six minutes without the oxygen that the
heart normally pumps to it through the bloodstream. So they set to work. Neal helped hold the head there while
17-year-old Dan Fagan prepared to puff lungful of air into the man’s mouth.
Meanwhile,
Ross Venema felt the chest to locate the lower tip of the breastbone. Moving his hands two fingers up from there,
Ross placed the heel of one hand on the lower breastbone, and the heel of the
other palm atop the first, and began a rhythmic, strong compression of the
chest, about once per second. Each time
he pressed down, the man’s heart was squeezed, forcing blood out to his
body. With Craig calling the count, Dan
inflated the victim’s lungs once every five times that Ross pressed down on his
heart.
Ross was
literally substituting for the victim’s heartbeat; Dan was literally breathing
for him. Almost magically, the man’s
terrible blue color began to fade away.
He was alive again—although only for as long as the youths continued
their successful cardio-pulmonary resuscitation [CPR].
Meanwhile,
another golfer had run to the clubhouse to call professional help. About eight minutes after the man’s collapse,
an Aid Car from a nearby firehouse slithered across the damp fairways. Two firemen took over the CPR efforts,
substituting an air-bag device for the mouth-to mouth breathing.
Ten minutes
after that, an elaborately equipped hospital rescue van arrived. Using an electrocardiography oscilloscope to
monitor the victim’s heart activity, electric paddles to shock his heart back
into normal rhythm, plus various medications, two of Seattle’s specially trained
firemen-paramedics worked for 27 minutes until they achieved a slow but stable
heartbeat and spontaneous breathing in the still-unconscious victim. Finally, they were able to transport him in
the rescue van to the nearest hospital where a fully monitored coronary-care
unit was available.
Three weeks
later, the victim, a 54-year-old airline executive, walked cheerfully out of
the hospital—with no trace at all of any permanent damage to brain of
heart! A group of schoolboys, using only
their own hands and exhaled breath, had brought him back from ‘clinical death’
and safety maintained his life until more sophisticated help could come. Without their application of CPR—that
combination of carefully controlled hand pressure on the chest, originated in
1960 by a Johns Hopkins University medical team, and of mouth-mouth breathing,
developed in the late 1950s—there is no question at all hut that the man’s
brain cells would have been irreparably destroyed.
Strangely,
however, the achievement of bringing the man back to life was noted only
briefly in Seattle newspapers. Shy? Because that city was on the handful of
foresighted communities across the country—Jacksonville, Florida and Grand
Rapids, Michigan, were others—which had undertaken to program to make such
lifesaving daring-do by ordinary citizens a matter of routine.
The model
Seattle plan, jointly implemented in March 1970 by Dr. Leonard A. Cobb, chief
of cardiology at Harbor view Medical Center, and the then fire chief, Gordon F.
Vickery, combined the city’s once catch-as-catch-can rescue and emergency
ambulance services into an efficient
Fire Department function. A fleet of
so-called Aid Cars—swift, rugged, one ton trucks outfitted to transport
patients—were readied and manned by firemen, all of whom had been trained in
advanced first aid and CPR. More than 50
firemen who volunteered for 1800-hour special courses were trained as
paramedical technicians at Harborview.
Now these experts, in two-man teams, are poised round-the-clock to hurry
to the scene of any heart attack, drowning, electrocution of sudden-death
emergency in one of the five mobile intensive-care units that have been
acquired.
When a
rescued patient arrives at the hospital in a mobile unit, he is moved
immediately to a bed in a fully monitored coronary-care of care-care unit. During the first ten years in which Seattle
firemen ran rescue missions, about 3000 sudden-death victims were treated. More than 800 of the victims were
successfully received and subsequently discharged from the hospital. “And it isn’t only these clinically dead who
have been saved,” Dr. Cobb points out. ‘thousands of other people suffering
less severe forms of heart attack also got rapid assistance, thanks to the same
rescue team.
Furthermore,
over 200,000 Seattle adults and teen-agers have been taught to perform CPR in
three-hour training courses at schools, offices, shopping centers, theaters and
homes. Firemen-paramedics carefully
explain how to recognize cardiac arrest and how to perform CPR. Then each trainee practices CPR on mannequins
engineered to respond just like a human body.
Today, two out of every five Seattle citizens have been trained in the
CPR technique as the teen-age golf-course heroes were.
The index of
teaching the public victims of sudden death back to life by using methods which
even doctors didn’t know about until 1960 was clearly a dramatic, even a
daring, concept. There can be pitfalls
in performing CPR. For instance, if a
great deal of air is blown into the stomach, it can cause trouble—even a state
of near-shock. Even when done exactly
right, CPR may carouse cracked ribs. And
when not done right the arrow-shaped tip of the breastbone or a broken rib can
puncture the liver of a lung.
The answer to
these worries is proper training, followed by periodic refresher courses. After all, if nothing is done for a person
whose heart and lungs have really stopped, death is sure.
Trained
rescue squads and prepared coronary-care hospital units are essential
prerequisites if citizen training in CPR is to reach its full potential for
saving lives. Dr. Archer S. Gordon,
former chairman of the American Heart Association’s committee on CPR and
emergency cardiac care, which has developed the accepted standards for the
technique, warns: “any person who requires CPR should also have follow-up medical
care.” But quickness in starting CPR is
equally indispensable, and even fireman cannot reach every ‘clinically dead’
victim within minutes. If no citizen
trained in CPR is at hand, a grain damaged human being or a corpse is then the
only prospect.
Hence the
prestigious 50,000 member American College of Physicians recommended that a
nationwide educational program be launched to teach CPR to the general
public. Special emphasis was given to
training doctors, nurses, medical students, firemen, policemen, ambulance
personnel and lifeguards. In addition,
these specialists argue, CPR should be taught to Scouts, airline stewardesses,
ski patrolmen, electric utility workers, members of the armed forces, relatives
of anybody with previous heart trouble—and also, in fact, to as many adults and
teen-agers as can be reached. (The
American Red Cross, the American Heart Association and other groups are
currently conducting a nationwide CPR training program.)
Occasions to
use CPR are not likely to be rare. It is
estimated that one in every six deaths in America—or about 350,000 each year—is
sudden. Most of these are caused by
heart arracks. Some involve drowning,
electrocutions and other accidents.
Autopsies of the victims in all of these categories have revealed large
numbers who surely would have lived on for many years if only they had been
helped past their immediate crises.
“I get a
funny feeling sometimes,” says one of the high school boys who save the Seattle
golfer, “when I think how helpless we would have been if we hadn’t been taught
CPR.” Some experts predict that, when
and if CPR training spreads across America, the number of people who will
actually be brought back to life could be in the thousands every year
