East Valley CPR

06/04/2025

🧠 Teach: Recognizing cardiac arrest, immediate CPR, staying calm under pressure.

05/30/2025

05/28/2025

🧠 Teach: Rescue breathing + CPR, water safety, calling EMS.

05/26/2025

Heather Baker was 28 and a school administrator in Pecatonica, Illinois, when she walked into a conference room for a meeting. She was chatting and joking with her colleagues when she was hit by a sudden wave of nausea.

"The whole room was spinning," she said.

She tried to tell her colleagues that something was wrong. She wanted to let them know that she might vomit. She tried to move toward the trash can.

Instead, she fell to the ground. She hit her head against the conference table and rolled onto the floor.

She'd gone into cardiac arrest.

Several of her colleagues thought she might be having a seizure, because she was gasping and her body was twitching. Not Bill Faller, her school district's superintendent. He'd gone through CPR training the month before and knew exactly what to do.

Faller started chest compressions while the school psychologist, who was eight months pregnant, ran for an automated external defibrillator, or AED. She was back in less than a minute.

Middle school principal Tim King walked into the room about that time. As a volunteer firefighter, he was trained to help. He used the AED to try restoring a normal rhythm. Her heart didn't respond. After a series of compressions, he did it again. More compressions, then a third use of the AED. It produced a sustainable rhythm.

At a hospital, doctors placed her into a medically induced coma. When she woke up the next morning, she heard the story of what had transpired. Her doctors told her just how remarkable her story was.

They'd never seen a 28-year-old experience cardiac arrest. Regardless of age, only about 10% of people survive cardiac arrest outside of a hospital.

"CPR saved my life," Baker said.

She had no known preexisting conditions or warning signs. She'd been an athlete all her life, playing varsity softball in high school, alongside being a member of the cheerleading team and the drum major of the marching band. She continued going to the gym nearly daily as an adult. She said colleagues would describe her as "vivacious, energetic and talkative."

Her medical team suspected a medication she was taking for migraines might have contributed, as it depleted

05/24/2025

05/21/2025

🧠 Teach: Scene safety, compression-only CPR in trauma settings.

05/19/2025

For Floyd Lawson, it started off as a normal weekend workout at his local YMCA branch. A veteran, husband, grandfather and gym regular, Lawson usually spends two hours or so at the gym doing cardio, stretching, lifting weights and then a visit to the steam room. To say he is active and in good health is an understatement.

However, on that Saturday in the spring of 2024, Lawson sat up after doing a round of crunches and felt the blood drain from his body.

“I thought ‘wow, let me compose myself,’” Lawson recalled. “And that is the last thing I remember. That is until I saw my guardian angel, Dr. Andy.”

On that same Saturday at the same YMCA by pure chance, Andrew Edwards, M.D., emergency medicine physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was working out with his son. He saw a group of people gathered around a man on the floor and immediately ran over to help.

“I realized what was happening — a man had collapsed and was suffering from what appeared to be cardiac arrest — so I jumped in to help a medical student and nurse who were already performing CPR on the man,” Edwards said. “We realized how dire the man’s situation was and that it was imperative that early onset and effective CPR and defibrillation were needed.”

After CPR was performed for nearly two minutes followed by advised shock via an AED, Lawson’s pulse went out again and Edwards did another round of CPR and defibrillation. Once Lawson woke up after nearly 10 minutes, Edwards was immediately able to route EMS to UAB Hospital and give a heads up to the attending in UAB’s University Emergency Department that Lawson was on the way.

“It felt like I was really put in the right place at the right time,” Edwards said. “I’ve been doing this long enough that I went into automation mode; I can help restart someone’s heart — this is my fastball. But outcomes can be variable if bystander CPR isn’t administered quickly and effectively. I’m really glad we were able to get him to UAB fast, too.”

05/14/2025

🧠 Teach: AED basics, scene safety, getting help while starting compressions.

05/12/2025

It’s a crisp Monday morning in Gresham, Oregon, and the sun has yet to crest the horizon. James Munson, 42, heads out the door, hops on his bike and starts his daily 7-mile ride to work. Along the Springwater Corridor Trail he rides, flanked by damp ferns, quiet woods, sleepy creatures, and the stillness of dawn.

How time flies, James ponders to himself. Seems like yesterday his eldest daughter was born. Today she turns 16, and he can hardly wait to see her and celebrate. Lost in thought, he pedals on, planning to work a half day, then fly to the East Coast with his younger daughter, age 4, for the party.

“That’s the last memory I have,” James says. “I was on the trail, and then I woke up and it was a couple days later. When I was finally lucid enough to figure out that I was in a hospital, the only thing I could think of was that maybe I had been hit by a car.”

Actually, James had blacked out, crashed his bike and experienced a sudden halt in his heartbeat. He could have lost his life. Instead, a total stranger saved it.

As the details emerged, James learned he’d had a sudden cardiac arrest on his way to work. One of his heart’s arteries was 90% blocked. An ambulance took him to Adventist Health Portland, where he had an emergency procedure by cardiologist Dr. Mark Hart. A stent, or small mesh tube, was placed in James’ heart to hold open the narrowed artery and help restore blood flow. During his recovery, relieved family members streamed in and out of the room as nursi