Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month

Opening and Introductions

Hello and welcome to a special LinkedIn and Facebook Live today. My name is Marie Manning. I handle marketing communications for the training services division here at the Red Cross. And I'm joined today by two members of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, and I think we're going to have an informative and inspiring talk today. Before we get started, if you'd like to tell me where you're tuning in from, that is always a fun way to get to know our viewers. I'm coming in here from Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, DC. Joe, Gina, where are you coming in from? I'm in Incline Village, Nevada on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe. All right. And hi, I'm joining from Delmar, New York, which is upstate New York, right outside of Albany. Fantastic.

World Restart a Heart Day and Cardiac Arrest Awareness

Well, today is a special day. It is World Restart a Heart Day, which is an effort that started up within the past decade, and it's to really encourage people to learn CPR, specifically hands-only CPR, so that you can, in an emergency, respond. This whole month is also Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month. And that's why today we are here with Gina and Joe.

So, did you know that every year, more than 350,000 people suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest? We distinguish out-of-hospital from in-hospital because the care required, immediate CPR use of an AED is, that's the same, but the skill level of those responding is different. So, in a hospital environment, of course, these folks are trained, they're trained on advanced resuscitation techniques, but if you're like the 70% of the cardiac arrests that happen in the home or out-of-hospital environment, the person saving the life of someone in cardiac arrest could be a friend or a loved one. So sometimes it could be a stranger as well.

So, we're here today to talk about that and to get you familiar with the concept of cardiac arrest and CPR. And we hope that you will learn a few things as you join us on this journey. So, we have a lot to cover today. It's exciting. And I'd like to have Joe and Gina introduce themselves.

Gina Introduction

So, Gina, I'm going to have you go first. If you could just give us a quick snippet of the work you do at the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation and your background, that would be fantastic to start off.

Sure, well, thank you so much, Marie. It's great to be joining you today. So, I'm the Executive Director of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation or SCAF for short as our acronym. Our mission as a national nonprofit organization is to raise awareness of sudden cardiac arrest and promote initiatives that help save lives through education, research, and community. And our vision is to eliminate death and disability from sudden cardiac arrest, as well as support those who have been affected by sudden cardiac arrest. I know that we're going to get into the programs in our discussion, so, you know, I'll talk about those in a bit.

But my personal background, well, professionally, I have lots of experience working in the patient advocacy community, so working in nonprofit management for all my career. And then I also have a personal connection to this work with a family member who lives with a cardiac condition that puts him at greater risk for sudden cardiac arrest. So, he lives with an ICD to help mitigate the risk for that, but sudden cardiac arrest is always top of mind, you know, both personally and professionally for me.

Joe Introduction

All right, it's so great that you get to work in a field that's both, you know, and is a passion of yours. And I know that with Joe, we're going to hear about his passion, it comes from personal incident. So, Joe, similar question for you, tell us about yourself and briefly so that our viewers know who you are and have a connection to you. And how did you get involved with Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation?

Well, a little bit on my background, first, Marie, if that's okay, is that I'm a retired Doctor of Physical Therapy and have practiced for 42 years, as did my wife, Edie. And we've been trained in CPR for 50 years as healthcare providers. And we've been instructors for the last 18 years since my survival of sudden cardiac arrest. And I've saved two lives with CPR, it works, and my life was saved by CPR, and I'll get into that a little bit later.

But how did I get involved with Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation?

Mary Newman, who's our former CEO, approached me in 2015 for Edie and I to speak at an AHA conference, which we did. And after our speech, she said, "What are you doing in your spare time?" I go, "I don't have much." (laughs) So she said, "Would you consider joining our board of directors?" Which I did, I've been a member of it since 2017, and I currently serve as the chairman or chairperson of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation. And Edie and I are paying forward, I'll tell you about that a little later, thank you.

Foundation Programs and Ready to Respond

Good, okay. Well, Joe, we're going to get to your story in just a bit. But Gina, first I want you to tell me, the foundation is all-encompassing in that it supports survivors, it supports families, communities, and individuals. So, tell me what it is that you do, and then I'd like to hear a little bit about Ready to Respond, this training week that you're having, because, I mean, it's very timely.

Yeah, of course, thank you. So, in terms of supporting patients and survivors and families, we have a program called CASA, the Cardiac Arrest Survivor Alliance, and that is our peer support online community. And so, that is for anyone who has been impacted by sudden cardiac arrest can join, there's no charge to join. We have over 2,000 members currently. Most of our members are sudden cardiac arrest survivors themselves, but we also have separate discussion forums for co-survivors, family, friends, loved ones, as well as lay rescuers and advocates as well.

So, there's an opportunity for people to join that online community, connect with other people who have been through sudden Cardiac arrest. We also share information and resources there. We host educational webinars with medical experts. We host virtual meetups for members to connect with each other. And we also work with researchers to do studies that are focused on post resuscitation quality of life.

So on kind of the public awareness and education side of things, our Ready to Respond campaign, so a lot of what we do is focused on public awareness and reaching other people to let them know about the importance of knowing what sudden cardiac arrest is, as well as knowing what to do in the case of an emergency. And so Ready to Respond is a new initiative this year. We're really excited about it, and it's part of our sudden Cardiac Arrest Training Week, which is happening right now, we're in the middle of it.

So Sudden Cardiac Arrest Training Week is the second week of October. And it's basically the idea is to host trainings and Ready to Respond events throughout the country to let people know, our tagline for the campaign is, learn the facts, gain the skills, save a life. And so that's really our goal, it's simple, is to teach people what sudden cardiac arrest is, how to recognize it, and knowing what to do, gain the skills, you know, in case of needing to respond.

So, teaching them how to do CPR, how to practice compressions, hands-only CPR on mannequins, how to use an AED. And so, we have over 80 events registered with us this week. So we're really excited that we've had such a great, positive response. So those are happening across the country right now. We have some event hosts are bringing training into their groups. So workplaces, schools, college campuses, scouts, you know, programs like that are training in. And then we have other community activities that are hosting trainings that are public, you know, and so in high traffic areas where people can be out and about and kind of happen upon a training and stay for, you know, join the table, learn about sudden cardiac arrest, learn about how to do CPR, practice compressions. And so just really trying to equip people with the skills and the confidence to know what to do in the case of a sudden cardiac arrest.

Joe’s Survivor Story

Right, and speaking of knowing what to do or having people know what to do in the case of cardiac arrest, I want to turn to Joe because I think he has a very compelling story to tell as a survivor. So, Joe, tell us what happened to you and what we can learn from it.

Well, as a precursor to my story, I'm a golfer, and in August of 2007 in Incline Village, Nevada, where I live now, I saved a man's life on the 12th green with CPR. And that's a big eyeopener. It's the first time I ever performed CPR on a victim in cardiac arrest. And thank the Lord, he survived.

Ironically, a year later, in August of 2008, August 9th, to be specific, I was at a professional friend's home at a memorial dinner party. I was there five minutes I was told by my wife, Edie, because I passed out and went into cardiac arrest. And thank goodness I was talking to someone who knew CPR, they started chest compressions, called 911. The paramedics got there, I was told in about four or five minutes. Edie said I was shocked seven times to get return of spontaneous circulation. I remained in a coma, went to Roseville Sutter Hospital in California, we were near there, and pretty big eyeopener.

Of course, I'm in a coma, so they did an angiogram. My arteries were clear. I arrested again in the cath lab. So, I had to be resuscitated. I spent the next day with hypothermia, in a coma another three days, and left the hospital about total 10 days. I had to wait to get a internal defibrillator inserted. So, you know, that's a pretty big eye-opener.

You say someone's life and then a year later, you have cardiac arrest, I was kind of shocked. My cardiologist said, "Somewhere in the gene pool, someone's had arrhythmias, and that's why you had this arrest. You know, you're pretty fit and eat well," and blah, blah blah, never smoked. So anyway, we started getting thoughts like, what are we going to do? This is life changing. Yes. You know, one minute you're dead, literally clinically dead. Yep. Then you're brought back to life with CPR and defibrillation. And we had a good friend from our church and I met with him and I said, "Tom, I got to do something, man. We got to give back; we got to pay forward."

Closing Remarks

Again, I just wanted to thank you so much for your partnership and the opportunity to join you today. I am grateful to connect and look forward to continuing to working together. And for anyone who's watching us today, please join us in this work. We'd love to have you join our mission, thank you.

I'd just like to thank you, Marie and American Red Cross, for setting this up. It's a huge honor as a survivor and chair of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation to be part of this event. I don't know the background of all the participants that listened, but I want to thank you all for taking a half hour or so out of your life to listen to us. And I hope we enlightened you and motivated you to help us raise awareness of sudden cardiac arrest in this country and the world so that it's becomes a household word, not just people don't know what it is. I trained 50 people this morning, my wife and I at an event here in Incline Village, and I'd say 75% didn't know the difference between a heart attack and a cardiac arrest. So please help us be advocates, help us educate, help us with awareness. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

All right, and if you do want to take a training class, please just go to redcross.org/take-a-class and you can find one near you. So, thank you, Joe, thank you, Gina. And thank you to all of our viewers. Thank you.