Training For Life

By Josh Letner
news@joplinglobe.com

WHEATON, Mo. — It was a normal day for Sally Sharp, a second-grade teacher at Wheaton Elementary School. But while she was eating lunch with a group of teachers, something happened that would change her life in ways she never could have imagined.

“I got ready to take a bite of meatloaf, and I remember looking up above my glasses and the room started spinning out of control,” Sharp said.

Melissa Creed, Sharp’s friend and fellow second-grade teacher, remembers what happened next on Jan. 19, 2011.

“She mumbled something, and I looked up,” Creed said. “She was as white as a ghost and fell backwards out of her chair.”

Sharp said she has no memory of what happened next.

“I was trying to tell them I was dizzy,” she said. “I don’t remember anything after that until what I call the twilight moments.”

Creed said she initially thought that Sharp, who is diabetic, was suffering from low blood sugar, but she quickly realized that something more serious was happening. She said other teachers ran to get help and returned with the school’s two nurses. One immediately began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Sharp, while the other ran to retrieve one of the school’s automatic electronic defibrillators.

Creed said she felt powerless to help her friend.

“I’ve had getting CPR training on my to-do list for years, but I had not done it. So, I felt completely helpless,” she said. “Thank God a nurse came in and started the CPR, but if it had been left in my hands, the outcome would have been very different.”

While students and teachers stood praying in the hallway, school nurse Karen Mitchell arrived with an electronic defibrillator and attached it to Sharp.

“I knew we had an AED, but I would have never gotten it because I didn’t know I was capable of using it,” Creed said. “I was so amazed. The nurse popped it open, and it started talking to us.”

After analyzing Sharp’s heart rhythms, the AED sent an electric pulse through her body, effectively jump-starting her heart.

“They put the AED on her, and it was amazing,” Creed said. “The moment it shocked her, she took a deep breath of air. It was just unbelievable.”

Sharp was conscious and responsive when paramedics arrived. She was taken to Mercy Hospital in Cassville and then to Springfield, where doctors inserted an internal defibrillator into her chest.

“It’s like my little ER,” Sharp said.

Sharp said the device, which lies just under her skin, can regulate her heartbeat and administer an electric shock to restart her heart in the event it stops again.

While recovering at home, Sharp decided to dedicate herself to educating the public on the importance of teaching CPR as well as the need for schools to have electronic defibrillators easily accessible in case of cardiac emergencies.

“One of the biggest changes to my life is that I’ve become an advocate for CPR and AEDs,” she said. “Before this, I didn’t know what an AED was. I didn’t even realize it was over there, let alone what it did. Now, I’m a lot more conscious of it.”

The American Heart Association says the lives of cardiac arrest victims are in the hands of bystanders 80 percent of the time. Immediate CPR more than doubles a victim’s chance of survival, but the association says that up to 70 percent of Americans feel helpless to act because of a lack of CPR training.

Sharp and Creed think that statistic has got to change. In the nearly 14 months since her life was saved, Sharp has become a vocal advocate for CPR education.

In January, she and Creed testified before the Health Care Policy Committee of the Missouri House of Representatives in favor of House Bill 1337. It would require that CPR be taught as a requirement for graduation from any Missouri high school.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rick Stream, R-Kirkwood, said in a phone interview Thursday that the bill was passed out of committee by consent and likely will reach the House floor after legislators return from their spring break.

Stream said a similar bill failed to make it out of the Senate last year after it was lumped in with a larger education bill that failed to pass. He said he is “cautiously optimistic” that it will pass both houses this year.

Stream, who was trained in CPR during his time in the Navy, said it is an important lifesaving skill that all students should know.

Said Creed: “It may not save their life, but just to know that you did everything you could to save them, because if Sally hadn’t made it, I would always live with that.”

Sharp said she has made several lifestyle changes. She exercises in the morning with her husband and walks after school with a group of teachers. She has lost 50 pounds in the past five months. She feels healthier now than she did before the episode with her heart.

Sharp and Creed have become certified in CPR. They also teach their pupils in the second grade not to be intimidated by defibrillators.

“I tell them to just grab it and open it, and if the adults are afraid, you can do it,” Creed said.

Sharp said she and Creed intend to return to Jefferson City if the bill comes before the Senate.

“I can’t just sit here and do nothing and hope this bill goes through,” Sharp said. “I got a second chance at life. My kids are all grown, but my grandchildren are getting ready to start school, and when they get to high school, I want it to be a norm that it’s either taught in their PE class or health class.”

Published: Monday, February 27, 2012, 7:00 AM
Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist

WARREN — She sat in the car, hands gripping the steering wheel, her face washed in her own tears. Before her stretched the complex of green athletic fields that looked exactly the way it did on that brutal day just two weeks earlier. Somehow, Karen Zilinski slid out of her car and began walking, first on gravel, then on grass, toward the scores of children and the adult coaches. She wept.

Suddenly, she felt arms reach for her and heard familiar voices, the voices of friends. One said, “You’re not doing this alone.’’

So, then, there were three women, all sobbing, walking toward the cheerleaders and the football players assembled for practice on the Warren Township field.

The men, women and children stopped what they were doing. They all knew who this woman was and why she was there. Some moved toward her, others held back. Many were crying.

“It was the beginning of healing,’’ says Zilinski. “Not just for me, not just for my family, but for everyone who knew Janet and who knew what happened.”’

Who knew that Karen’s 11-year-old daughter, her shopping buddy, her sharer of secrets, had two weeks before collapsed on that field and, within hours, was dead.

Says Karen: “As much as there is the natural instinct to want to blame someone, the reality was it just wasn’t meant to be.” Her return to the field was the start of acceptance of that terrible reality.

After that, Karen, her husband Jim and their son Jimmy took as much of the pain as they could and put it into the Janet Fund and into lobbying for Janet’s Law so their little girl always will be remembered and so, maybe, more children will not die from sudden cardiac arrest.

The way Janet died that night in August, 2006. The way 30 other children in New Jersey have died since then.

“I know Janna would have done great things in her life,’’ says her father Jim, using her daughter’s nickname. “The fund is doing the good work she would have done — her legacy lives on and it is going to be a legacy to save lives.”

The Zilinskis have donated more than 100 automated external defibrillators (AEDs) to schools and athletic teams. They believe if one had been at the field in Warren, Janna would be alive. They also have provided CPR training to more than 1,500 people.

Their fund posted billboards on New Jersey highways, warning of the dangers of sudden cardiac arrest among children and the need for AEDs.

“She had a physical just six weeks before and she seemed fine,’’ says Jim.

The exam did not reveal the congenital defect that fatally weakened the arteries behind her heart. A defect discovered by a researcher at Baylor Medical School in Texas who examined her heart two years after Janna died.

“We had to bury her without her heart so we could find out what happened,” says Jim.

They do other things. Secret, anonymous things. Like coming out the night before the funeral of a soldier killed in Afghanistan to plant hundreds of American flags along the roadway in Martinsville.

“Janna was very patriotic,” says Karen, an executive with Chubb Insurance.

But they haven’t been able to persuade the Legislature to pass Janet’s Law requiring the availability of AEDs where children learn and play. It twice made it past education committees in both houses but died in budget panels because legislators believed it would cost too much.

The original bill would have required the devices at schools and athletic fields. An amended version requires that only schools have them.

“Our passion was for putting them at athletic fields because that’s where Janna was,’’ says Jim, a former hospital nutritionist recently laid off from his job at the American Heart Association.

The New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, and groups representing school nurses, athletic trainers, and pediatricians support the bill.

Other groups, including the New Jersey League of Municipalities, opposed the original version.

The Zilinskis, both 44, say they will keep lobbying, raising money, and performing what Jim calls “secret, random acts of kindness.’’ They will hold their only fund-raiser of the year March 1 in Stirling — the speaker will be a 17-year-old cheerleader from North Hunterdon High saved by an AED.

They say they let their children guide them. Janna, they say, wanted to help other children — she was a peer leader in her school and sought out as friends children excluded by others. And Jimmy, Janna’s kid brother, now 13, began the process of healing — for them and for his community.

On that evening two weeks after Janna died, Jimmy, then only 8, talked his parents into letting him return to the football team that was practicing with Janna’s cheerleading squad.

“He told us, ‘I want to go back to playing football. Janna would want me to play. My teammates need me. I’ve got to be there.’’’

So Jim took him to practice. Karen stayed home. She was still repeating to herself, “I cannot go back there” as she got into her car for the trip to the place where she lost Janna.