Cardiac arrest leads to life saving donation

Dr. Richard Newman and his wife Julie Peterson Newman, Ph.D., RN, were running through downtown San Antonio preparing for the New York City Marathon. Suddenly, Richard felt weak. He collapsed. His breathing stopped, and he did not have a pulse. He was in cardiac arrest.

“I started CPR,” Julie said. “...I asked a bystander to tell EMS where we were on the trail. I gave him CPR for 13 minutes. EMS found us, and they defibrillated him. That is what saved his life. I was just trying to give him time until the AED arrived.”

Julie was trained in CPR and administered it properly. That means she broke her husband’s ribs and punctured his lung in the process of keeping his blood pumping. Once hooked up to the AED, “they defibrillated him one time and back into a non-lethal rhythm,” she said.

It took about six months for Richard to recover from the wounds inflicted upon him during the life saving effort, but he was able to start running again. Now, years later, he is back to running marathons.

“I can attest to it,” Richard said. “…That is what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to break somebody’s ribs (when doing CPR.) When I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit, the only thing that was bothering me was my chest. It was broken, but it saved me. That is what you have to do… Had Julie not been with me, I wouldn’t be here today. I’d be dead. And had I not had initial attention like CPR when I went down, and they had just called EMS… I would have had significant neurological injury.”

The experience inspired the Newmans to try and make sure an Automated External Defibrillator is available in places that they care about. They own a home in Woodcreek and were looking for a spot nearby where a defibrillator could potentially be immediately accessible to the most people. So the couple donated an AED machine to the Wimberley Lions Club who worked with local business owners to find a place where such a machine would be most useful.

Now, an AED hangs on the side of Wimberley Cafe in the Wimberley Square.

“I think having an AED in the public is going to be a gigantic advantage for all of us,” Ken Strange, executive director of the Wimberley EMS, said. “If someone were to go down, it is very important that we have an AED close by. It is going to give us an advantage. This particular AED is going to work well, because it will plug right into our equipment if we come up here with an EMS. We’ll be able to plug it right into our monitor and use the pads that are in there and move forward with that.”

Strange said they would offer a training course to employees working at the cafe on how to use the AED, but the machine is made to be used by those with no experience.

“You turn it on, and it will tell you what to do,” Julie said. “It shows you where the pads go, it will tell you if a shock is indicated or not indicated. All you have to do is press the green button and it will take it from there.”

To learn more about Automated External Defibrillators and CPR, visit cpr.heart.org/en/ resources/what-is-cp.

“90% of the time, when you collapse and you have a cardiac arrest, you won’t make it,” Julie said. “Those are the statistics… But this increases your odds of survival if you can hang on by doing CPR long enough until that defibrillator arrives, and then those chances of survival are increased quite significantly.”