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Sunday, January 1, 2012

This is what is supposed to happen!

Bystanders save heart victim at 'Y' Shavalya Matthews had just finished a fitness workout Tuesday morning when she heard a commotion on the Bear-Glasgow YMCA’s basketball court.
YMCA staff were working frantically to revive 22-year-old Kyle Trent, who had collapsed and gone into cardiac arrest while performing basketball drills, Matthews said.
After administering CPR, the YMCA staff used an automated external defibrillator to keep Trent’s heart pumping blood and oxygen before paramedics could arrive.
“It was remarkable,” said Matthews, of Newark. “It changed my whole entire life to see someone relentlessly performing CPR and save this man’s life.”
The chances of surviving out-of-hospital cardiac arrest are slim, with 10 percent or fewer patients living to be discharged from the hospital in some medical studies.
Doctors told Trent’s parents that the work of the YMCA employees helped their son narrowly escape death last week. After spending 24 hours in a medically induced coma, Trent is recovering at Christiana Hospital over the New Year’s holiday.
“They really don’t have a clear explanation of what happened,” said mother Terri Trent, whose son is a 2007 graduate of Howard High School.
YMCA of Delaware staff declined comment about Kyle Trent, citing a federal health privacy law.
But Trent’s parents, Terri and Warren, and Matthews are praising YMCA employees for quickly coming to the young man’s aid within 90 seconds of his collapse on the basketball court.
The Trents, formerly of Newark, and their daughter, Kyra, flew cross-country Tuesday from their home in Phoenix, arriving at midnight Wednesday to a hospital waiting room full of Delaware friends.
“This was a parent’s worst nightmare,” Warren Trent said. “People stood in the gap until we got here.”
Christiana Hospital surgeons implanted a defibrillator inside Trent’s chest, his father said.
The three YMCA employees who performed CPR and New Castle County paramedics who rushed him to the emergency room visited the Trent family at the hospital this week, Warren Trent said.
“What do you say to someone who saved somebody’s life other than thank you?” said Warren Trent, a former Wilmington bureau chief for WPVI-TV who now works for a TV station in Phoenix.
After Kyle’s near-death experience, Warren Trent said he hopes more public buildings and parks become equipped with automated external defibrillators.
Terri Trent is thankful for the family’s friends in Delaware who have visited the hospital this week and started a prayer chain.
“It is nothing short of a miracle,” Terri Trent said. “I personally believe it’s the story of prayer that saved him.”
Kyle Trent, a junior English major at Neumann University in Aston, Pa., likely will not be on a basketball court for the next several months, his father said.
“I’m feeling pretty good,” Kyle Trent said Friday from his hospital bed. “I’m ready to get out of bed.”
Written by Chad Livengood clivengood@delawareonline.com - Published in Delaware Online, A Gannett Company.

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