Ottawa student saves father’s life with CPR

When Scott Blostein recognized that his father needed CPR, he knew how to react...

When Scott Blostein’s younger sister woke him up at 5 a.m., one winter morning, he knew something was seriously wrong.

The eighteen-year-old Ottawa student was sound asleep when his sister Amy ran frantically into his room. “Dad isn’t waking up,” she exclaimed.

A few minutes earlier, 12-year old Amy, had woken up with a headache and gone to see her parents. Her mom, Margo, told her to go get some aspirin. While trying to get back to sleep, Margo noticed her husband, Alan, was making odd noises and something just wasn’t right.

“He was turning blue,” Margo says. “I jumped out of bed and tried to shake him, telling him to wake up.”

Nothing was working.

That’s when Margo called for Amy to get Scott, who was sleeping downstairs.

“I got up right away,” says Scott, who ran upstairs to his parents’ room where he found his father lying face down on the bed. “I rolled him over and right away I knew what I had to do,” he says.

Scott and his 15-year old brother Matt, who had woken from the commotion, moved their dad onto the floor while their mother called 9-1-1.

Scott checked for vitals - there weren’t any.

“I was kind of in shock,” he says. “I went into CPR right away.”

Scott received lifesaving training in his physical education class through the ACT High School CPR Program at Brookfield High School in Ottawa. Scott says this background prepared him well.

“When I was doing CPR on my dad, I was thinking of all the training I got,” he says. “It came naturally.”

Following arrival of the paramedics and transport to hospital, it was later confirmed that Alan had suffered a cardiac arrest. He has since made a full recovery and is forever grateful to his quick-acting son.

“When I think back to what happened, I’m so proud and grateful that my son saved my life,” says Alan, who urges everyone to learn CPR. “It could be you saving your father’s life, you just never know.”

For Scott, the lifesaving power of CPR is something he will never forget. “The biggest honour was giving life back to the man who gave me life.”

The ACT High School CPR Program was made possible in Scott Blostein’s school thanks to generous community and provincial-level support which enabled the donation of mannequins, teacher training and curriculum resources. The lead community partner in Ottawa is the Kiwanis Club of Ottawa. The print partner which donates the printing of the student manual is the Ottawa Citizen. Provincial partners of the program are the Government of Ontario, Hydro One, and The Ontario Trillium Foundation.

The Advanced Coronary Treatment (ACT) Foundation is an award-winning, national charitable organization dedicated to establishing CPR in high schools across Canada. ACT raises funds to donate mannequins, teacher training, manuals and other materials to schools, and guides schools in program set-up and long-term sustainability. Teachers teach CPR to their students as a regular part of the curriculum. More than 1,500,000 youth have been trained in CPR through this lifesaving program to date.

Core partners supporting the program in Ontario and throughout Canada are companies in the research-based pharmaceutical industry: AstraZeneca Canada, Bristol-Myers Squibb Canada, Pfizer Canada and sanofi-aventis. They provide ACT’s sustaining funding and are committed to the Foundation’s national goal of promoting health and empowering Canadians to save lives.

(Published by the ACT Foundation)

Who needs full CPR - breaths & compressions?

The easiest way to remember this is to think about what CPR accomplishes: it causes the oxygen-caring blood to circulate.

...and where does that oxygen come from?

1. There is some residual oxygen in your blood when you die;
2. There is some residual air in your lungs when you finish exhaling;
3. Some air will move in and out of the lungs when you perform chest compressions, particularly if you can get the victim's head into the "sniffing position." [Sniff to see if you can smell something. Freeze. That's the sniffing position.]

So what about the person who drowned? That person used up every shred of residual air in the lungs and nearly every shred of residual oxygen in their blood. They will get a little bit of air in-and-out of the lungs as you perform chest compressions, but not a lot. They could really use a little help in the oxygen department.

And what about the child who arrested, whether or not they drowned? The residual air in the lungs doesn't help a lot, because their lungs are so small. The amount of air that is going to go in and out with chest compressions is very small compared to their need. And children "compensate" very well - they won't have much residual oxygen in their blood stream when they arrest. They also could really use a little help in the oxygen department.

Personally, I don't have a problem doing mouth-to-mouth CPR on any young child I've just pulled out of a pool. You're blowing in, not sucking out, after all. What you really want to watch out for is doing mouth-to-mouth without a barrier device on someone who perhaps bit his tongue when he fell down in cardiac arrest and has blood flowing out of his mouth. That's when - as a bystander - the "If it's not safe, don't do it!" rule ought to occur to you. On the ambulance, we have a duty to respond. When you have a duty to respond, you don't have the protection of a Good Samaritan law, and you don't have a choice regarding whether the victim is going to get mouth-to-mouth or not.

One last point: if you position a toddler on his or her back on the floor, the disproportionately large back of the head will cause the head to tilt "chin-down" and thus effectively pinch off the air path to the lungs. You may have to improvise, but to maintain a viable airway in those victims, a phone book under the shoulder blades will really help, unless you are from a really small town, in which case two phone books might be needed. The nice thing about phone books is that they are not compressible.

Bob

A hard, flat surface and how to get the patient onto it.

CPR saves lives because chest compressions cause blood to circulate in the cardiovascular system until the heart gets re-started. Without the oxygen that the blood caries to the brain, the brain will die.

Chest compressions don't work when the patient is on a "squishy" surface. You cannot do effective CPR on a person who is in bed or on a person seated in a chair. Even if you have a CPR board handy, it's not as effective as getting the patient onto the floor.

(You cannot do effective CPR on someone who is lying face-down, either. This possibility would not have occurred to me, had I not walked into a residence on a 911 call, only to see someone trying this.)

So how do you get a really large patient onto his or her back on the floor? The first step is to get the patient onto the floor, without worrying about the "on his or her back" bit.

If you are alone and if you can't pull the patient out of bed or roll the patient onto the floor, walk around to the side of the bed you don't want the patient on the floor next to, untuck the bottom sheet and throw it over the patient. Walk back to the other side, grab the sheet, and pull it as if you were playing tug-of-war. The patient will roll out of bed and onto the floor. The bigest problem with this strategy is that many people let their fear that they will hurt the cardiac arrest victim interfere with the degree to which they really try. To them, I can only offer this: "That victim is already dead, and unless you get that victim onto his or her back on a hard, flat surface, they almost assuredly will stay dead. Don't worry about hurting the patient. Just do it."

The same holds for a victim who arrests in a chair. If you cannot pull the victim out of the chair, tip the chair over. Use the handle of a broom as a pry bar, if you need to, but get the victim onto the floor.

Victims dumped onto the floor seldom are considerate enough to land on their backs. Here's how to get them there:

1. Straighten the limbs: it's a lot easier to roll someone whose legs are straight and in line with the torso. Ditto for the arms, either at their sides or over their head.
2. Roll the victim unto the back, and start pumping that chest. If you are in a cramped space and there's no room to roll the patient, stand over the patient with one foot on each side of the patient, grab whatever clothing you can grab at the side - not the top - of the patient and using your knees so you don't hurt your back, pick the patient straight up and then set the patient down. You many have to do this several times.

Let me know if this isn't clear, and I'll make a video of it.

Bob

Five simple, surprising facts.

Let me share with you five simple facts that many people don’t know:

1. There is a 1 in 7 chance that you, personally, will witness at least one sudden cardiac arrest during your lifetime.

2. The odds are 85 percent that the victim will be a family member, a friend, or someone you know.

3. If all you do is call 911, that victim has a 1 in 20 chance of getting out of the hospital with major brain functions intact. These are the survivors

4. The other 19 out of 20 people don’t all die – just the lucky ones. Some of the 19 will spend the rest of their lives with terrible neurological deficits, frequently in long-term care facilities, unable to perform the activities of daily living without assistance. The victim doesn’t want this, the family doesn’t want this, and the cost can be ruinous.

5. If in addition to calling 911 you also start CPR, the chances of the victim’s surviving the arrest go up….way up. And the number of victims who would have otherwise spent the rest of their life in a care facility will go down.

Now that you know these five facts, let me share one more: if – knowing what you now know – you don’t learn Bystander CPR before you witness a family member, a friend, or an acquaintance die of a cardiac arrest, the odds are high that you will have a difficult time dealing with the knowledge that you might have been able to save that person, had you only invested an hour in learning what to do.

My name is Bob. I’m a paramedic and the president of a public charity in Savannah, GA. We’re informally known as “SLICC” – as in Saving Lives in Chatham County. We exist to teach people how to perform Bystander CPR, how to use an external automated defibrillator - commonly called an AED, how to safely resolve a choking emergency, and how to recognize when someone is having a stroke. We took our test zip code from about five percent trained to more than twenty-seven percent trained in 2 years.

We are applying for a grant from the Pepsi Refresh Everything project to permit us to expand our program across all of Chatham County and eventually across the U.S.A. Whether we get the grant or not depends upon how many votes we get in October.

I’m asking three things of you:

1. Learn CPR now! Please!
2. Register as a “follower” on this blog site so that when it’s time to vote, we can get instructions to you regarding how to vote.
3. When you receive the voting instructions in late September, make it a point to vote.