DIDN’T MISS A BEAT

A relatively modern medical device — and staff who appreciate its importance — is saving lives at neighborhood schools

BY CHRISTINA HUGHES BABB

In racing, every second counts. It was especially true one afternoon last December at Lake Highlands Junior High, when track coach Craig Titsworth assigned his sixth-period runners a relatively benign offseason workout — a few 100-, 200- and 400-meter intervals.

As the first group barreled toward its destination, 13-year-old Joe Krejci hit the ground.

It’s an old cinder track, so trips and falls are not uncommon, the coach explains, and for a second, no one thought much about it. But then Joe didn’t get up.

“Coach T” was some 90 meters away from the incident, he says, when he saw concerned looks cross the other boys’ faces, and they motioned for him to come.

“I sprinted, and I saw him, unconscious. I called 911.”

Titsworth handed the phone to a student, who briefed the operator, as the coach sprung into action.

“I checked his head, stabilized his neck, felt for bumps or blood ...”

He had a slight pulse, but he was not breathing.

“I looked up to see the two fastest kids in the district standing over me,” Titsworth says. “I mean, I’m thinking, God’s provision, right? These guys, Max Orvik and Blessed Divounguy, are not just our two fastest eighth-graders — they were first and second in the last citywide track meet these are the fastest [middle school] runners in all of Richardson ISD.”

Find the school nurse, Coach T told them. They tore toward the building — which sits several hundred yards from the track, the nurse’s office at the opposite end — while the coach debated whether to start CPR. Trained in first-aid, he knew he was not supposed to if the patient was breathing. But was this breathing? Still unconscious, Joe imparted these strange deep shaky gasps.

“I later learned this was agonal respiration, death breath, and he wasn’t actually breathing, not really. His pulse was what my EMT [emergency medical technician] brother would call thready, he was turning blue, and drawing these labored breaths every 15-20 seconds.”

Then the runners were back. Alongside them hurried an out-of-breath nurse Annie Young, carrying an A.E.D., an automated external defibrillator designed to shock an arresting heart back into rhythm.

In 2007, Texas passed a law requiring an A.E.D. in every Texas school.

“Something just told me to grab it,” Young says. “It was the looks on the boys’ faces and the way they said ‘collapsed’.”

The team, Young, front office administrator Syreeta Love and God, all are to thank for Joe’s survival, Titsworth says. But if not for that small piece of medical technology, which staffers at every Richardson ISD campus are trained to use, he knows things could have been devastatingly different.

The coach hurdled the chain-link fence surrounding the track, grabbed the A.E.D., leapt back over and put the pads on Joe’s chest and left side.

The device registers, checks for an unsynchronized heart rhythm (the cause of most sudden cardiac arrests, according to the American Red Cross) and displays instructions.

“Shock advised,” it read. So Coach pressed the machine’s “shock” button, delivering an electric volt through Joe’s chest to his heart.

By then Love and Young were assisting, the nurse administering chest compressions.

The track coach, by profession a stickler for time, notes that Joe dropped to the ground at 3:04 p.m. He delivered the shock at 3:12 p.m. The ambulance arrived at 3:15 p.m.

As the ambulance pulled away, the coach and the boys who ran for help all worried that they hadn’t acted fast enough, they all say days later.

“I wondered, what if I didn’t run fast enough,” Max says.

At the hospital that night, while Titsworth visited, doctors told Joe and his parents that the shock saved him — that