Chris Dalldorf lives, and the public responds
After my story Saturday on how Greensboro Day staffers saved eighth-grader Chris Dalldorf's life with a portable defibrillator, I got several e-mails, including some containing information I thought merited wider distribution.
Dr. Michael Simmons, who was quoted in the story, wrote to stress the need to have portable defibrillators in all schools. Potentially fatal heart problems are no respecter of age, and some genetically-based heart problems have surfaced in otherwise healthy kids even younger than Chris (who turns 15 in April). The Guilford County Schools have devices in all high schools and middle schools, but relatively few elementary schools have them at this point. One angle from Greensboro Day that I didn't have room to include in my print story was that faculty/staff there bought devices with money forfeited from people's health-care reimbursement accounts -- money that was paid in but never pulled back out to pay health expenses. Linda Sudnik, the school nurse, urges people to think creatively about how these purchases might be paid for, and she's speaking from experience on that.
Joe Mullins e-mailed to point out that Jon Schner, the school director of sports medicine who was instrumental in reviving Chris, is a certified athletic trainer who is licensed by the state of North Carolina. He thinks it's a good idea to have at least one such licensed professional on the staffs of all secondary schools, although North Carolina does not currently require that.
Finally, I heard today from Shellie Wenhold, who used to live in Greensboro with her family before moving to Georgia in 2004. In October 2004, her son Jonathan, who had attended Jesse Wharton Elementary here, went into sudden cardiac arrest at his school in Georgia. The school did not have a defibrillator, and paramedics arrived with one roughly 10 to 12 minutes after Jonathan's collapse -- too late to prevent brain damage from loss of oxygen. Jonathan died after eight days in the hospital.
Ms. Wenhold wanted to make people aware of two organizations whose work falls into this area.
The Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation seeks to prevent sudden death due to heart abnormalities and to support families who have lost a member to this disorder.
Parent Heart Watch is a national network of families who either have lost a child to sudden cardiac arrest or who have children at known risk for it. It keeps databases of children who have died because of sudden cardiac arrest and of children who suffered it but were saved.
Ms. Wenhold has been active in this area since losing her son. She and others even helped obtain a portable defibrillator for Jonathan's former school, Jesse Wharton.
If there's a lesson to be taken away from her sad story and what happened to Chris Dalldorf, it's that we need portable defibrillators in more places and we need more people trained in how to use them. (Schner and Sudnik demonstrated it for me -- it looks so easy even a klutz like me could do it.) Training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation also remains crucial. Schner estimates that only 4 to 6 percent of North Carolinians are trained in CPR. If I or one of my children went into sudden cardiac arrest, I'd prefer the odds be much, much higher.
UPDATE: Today (April 1) the New England Journal of Medicine publishes both a paper and an editorial about the potential benefits of having a portable defibrillator at home. Research showed no statistically significant benefit, and the editorial notes, "As usual, marketing of such devices is charging far ahead of science." The study and editorial did not address the potential benefits of having such devices in public places.
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