OLYMPIA – As a 22-year-old vegetarian skiing and sailing instructor, Beverly Elmer isn’t the type of person you’d expect to have heart problems.
“I was lying down in bed and turned to Weylin and said, ‘Baby, oh god,’ and clenched my chest,” she said.
Her memory stopped moments before, so she could only recall what she’s been told about the event.
“I guess that’s when my eyes rolled into the back of my head.”
Elmer’s boyfriend, Weylin Rose, performed CPR for 10 minutes before EMTs arrived on the scene. If he would have stopped, even just for a moment, it could have cost Elmer her life.
Elmer, a Renton resident, didn’t suffer a run-of-the-mill heart attack. She is one of approximately 326,000 people who suffer every year from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), and only one in 10 victims live to tell the tale.
“A lot of times the first symptom of sudden cardiac arrest is actually sudden cardiac arrest,” said Darla Varrenti, of Mill Creek, whose 16-year-old son Nicholas died of a sudden cardiac arrest following a weekend of football in 2004.
In Nicholas’s honor, Varrenti founded the Nick Of Time Foundation, a non-profit organization, which she now serves as executive director, dedicated to reducing rate of SCA in young adults and children. The foundation has held SCA awareness events and CPR classes at 41 different Washington schools and has screened over 13,000 students for heart abnormalities.
The issue has surfaced in Olympia where legislators, in partnership with Nick Of Time, are pushing a bill aimed at educating students and parents on how to prevent sudden cardiac arrest in schools and sports settings.
Typical heart attacks occur when blood flow to the heart — for one reason or another — has either slowed or stopped completely. SCA, on the other hand, is an electrical issue that causes the heart to abruptly shut down, rendering the victim unconscious and legally dead until someone can get the heart pumping again.
That initial response is key. According to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, survival rates drop between 7 and 10 percent for every minute a victim goes without some form of CPR.
“CPR isn’t going to bring them back, because with sudden cardiac arrest they’re basically already dead,” Varrenti said. “The CPR helps the blood move through the body before an AED can be brought to the scene, administering electric shock to actually try to reboot their heart and get it back in a normal rhythm.”
Heart valve and rhythm disorders are most often the culprits behind SCA episodes; although recreational drug use, electrocution and sudden blows to the chest also have been known to cause it in individuals without pre-existing heart conditions.
Although his family didn’t know it at the time, Nicholas suffered a disease that causes the heart’s muscle tissue to thicken without any obvious cause. The condition tends to show no signs or symptoms until it causes the victim to go into sudden cardiac arrest.
Elmer suffers from a heart rhythm disorder that, like Nicholas’s condition, isn’t obvious until something goes wrong. The syndrome is a hereditary condition, so as an adopted child, Elmer had no knowledge of the dangers of her affliction until it was almost too late.
“This is something that parents and athletes need to know about, because this is something that can happen without any warning,” Varrenti said. “Right now, we don’t do enough to make sure that our kids’ hearts are safe.”
The American Heart Association estimates that more than 6,000 people under 18 experience sudden cardiac arrest each year. Undetected heart conditions are the leading causes of death in young athletes, who as a group make up over half of all youth sudden cardiac arrest cases.
“This happens to athletes more often because of the high activity level that athletes have,” Varrenti said. “But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen to kids who are in PE class or even science class. We have a friend who lost her 5-year-old daughter on the playground. It happens to all kinds of kids.”
That’s why Varrenti thinks the best place to start with SCA awareness, for all ages, is in the classroom. And members the Washington Legislature agree with her.
With the help of eight other legislators, Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, constructed SB 5083 — the Sudden Cardiac Awareness Act — that would require schools and community athletic organizations to hold informational meetings at the beginning of each school year to educate parents and young athletes about the risks of SCA.
The bill also calls for Nick Of Time, in a partnership with the University of Washington medicine center for sports cardiology, to develop an online educational pamphlet that parents would have to read and sign off on before their child could participate in athletics programs. Coaches would be required to complete an online SCA prevention program every four years.
The Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Act is similar to the Zackery Lystedt Law, a 2009 bill that requires similar measures be taken in promoting concussion awareness. In the five years since Washington first passed the law, all 49 other states have adopted similar legislation.
Varrenti told McAuliffe that her wish was to see a bill similar to the Lystedt law that would educate parents on the possible consequences of not knowing how healthy their children’s hearts are. If parents had the information in front of them, Varrenti thought, they would be more inclined to get their child screened for heart problems.
“That’s when she told me, ‘Well, we can do that. Let’s start working on it,’” she said.
SB 5083 was introduced on Jan. 13 and a public hearing held in the Senate Committee on Early Learning & K-12 Education on Jan 22. On Wednesday, Jan. 28, a companion bill was introduced to the House of Representatives.
Cooper Inveen is a reporter with the WNPA Olympia News Bureau.
