As we get full into fall sports season, we are seeing the beauty of sports in full display. We are seeing hard fought games from the youth to professional levels, great plays by dedicated athletes on the field, and excitement and fun on the faces and in the actions of passionate fans. This is all great and things we should encourage. We should, however, also be mindful of the risks associated with sports, especially those that we have some control over with respect to prevention and/or treatment.

In an incredible story from high school football, a young man collapsed on the sideline after scoring a touchdown as he was in the throes of an asthma attack. His heart stopped for a full two minutes – again, two minutes – before the wife of team’s statistician rushed down to the field. Thankfully, for everyone, she is a cardiac nurse. She diagnosed the situations and performed the CPR that saved the player’s life.

From the article by Cameron Smith at Yahoo!Rivals, “Further testing determined that Demison suffers from a heart defect that limited the amount of blood from his left coronary artery, a condition which left him without enough blood reaching his heart during exertion. He will have to undergo surgery in the next month to correct the condition, and should make a full recovery for his senior season…The incident has also spurred activism from Demison’s father, who has used his son’s incident to call for mandatory heart screening of all high school athletes.”

We think Mr. Demison’s drive to make sure this does not happen to other young student-athletes is commendable. We would also like to see Mr. Demison and others do something that will be cheaper than any testing and will ensure that in the event of emergencies like this, there will not have to be a 2-minute wait. And that is, know CPR.  This is a logical takeaway from this almost–tragic situation. The player was lucky that an alert nurse was in the stands. Others may not be so lucky.

To see the full article, please click here.

And to find a CPR class near you, you can click here to go to the site for the American Heart Association. Let’s make being trained in CRP a play in our playbook.