07/09/2025
After a 5-mile run, Mark Kleinschmidt couldn't stop sweating. Then his chest felt tight, and he fell to the floor. He managed to crawl down the hall his daughter’s room. Allison, a nurse, happened to be visiting. "I think I'm having a heart attack," Mark gasped.
Allison dialed 911 and gave her father aspirin. Then Mark collapsed – the heart attack had led to cardiac arrest.
For 20 minutes Allison kept chest compressions going. Performing CPR in the NICU where she worked was quite different from doing so on an adult, especially when that adult was her own father.
Paramedics arrived and used an automated external defibrillator, or AED, to try shocking his heart into a sustainable rhythm. It took seven tries. He was shocked again in the ambulance and at the hospital.
Mark was placed in a medically induced coma. He spent a month in the hospital, dealing with complications that included fluid in his lungs. In cardiac rehab he set the goal of running again. Four months later – on a freezing New Year's Day in 2018 – he ran a 5K.
"My doctors, PTs and OTs were skeptical," he said. "But I did it."
Mark's ordeal could have played out differently. His life was saved because his daughter knew what to do when it mattered most. He began hosting CPR training events, urging friends and colleagues to learn the lifesaving technique. After one of those events, a friend went to the doctor and discovered he, too, had a serious blockage.
"If you can learn CPR and have the tools to help save someone's life, why wouldn't you take the time to learn?" Allison said. "Something so simple can result in something so amazing – like saving a life. In this case, it just happened to be my dad."
