Clinical Resource: Marathoner Thanks Heart Team at UAMS

Jon Norcross: I had my uh cardiac arrest on a monday and of course don’t remember anything until that Thursday, so about four days, and I actually had lost even memory wise the Sunday before when I woke up, and still some of this is told to me by my wife, and you know I called her and said what am I doing here because you wake up and it’s all kind of strange.

Dr. Hakan Paydak: He suddenly collapsed and his wife did CPR and saved his life and the ACLS protocol was applied by the EMS who went there to the to the field immediately and they brought the patient to UAMS we

had him originally we didn’t want to do invasive procedures immediately because we want to make sure that

his brain function is preserved after such a event. We admitted him to the medical intensive care unit and we kept them there and we cooled them for 48 hours. What cooling does is it preserves the brain oxygen metabolism.

Norcross: The staff was great they took all kinds of time to explain what had happened, the tests that they had done and so I’m tremendously grateful for their patience with me.

Dr. J. Paul Mounsey: Cardiac arrest is usually caused by heart disease blocked coronary arteries weakness in

the heart long-standing high blood pressure. In him we couldn’t find an obvious cause for the for the cardiac arrest he was mercifully resuscitated from the cardiac arrest and he got to the hospital with a stable rhythm and his

vital organs had survived the cardiac arrest since we couldn’t figure out why he had the cardiac arrest

what he needed was a device called a defibrillator and you’ve all seen on I don’t know one on the television

people comes if somebody comes into the emergency room and the nurse says doctor the patient’s having a cardiac arrest and they put pads on the chest and the patient well to have a defibrillator implanted does all the things that that defibrillator you’ve seen on the television does but it does it automatically so it’s like having the rescue squad in

your hip pocket. The rescue squad is there it’s a box that was implanted under the skin here under his arm with a

wire that ran on the outside of the chest up the breastbone and the device sits there and it listens to the heart and while the heart’s beating normally it does nothing but if the heart ever goes into cardiac rest the device hears that and administers a life-saving shock to the heart a life-saving electric shock to the heart.

Dr. Paydak There was a big trial that was done in the United States years ago. In that trial defibrillators have been

shown to be better than medications in these patients who have suffered the cardiac arrest. We decided to go with

subcutaneous ICD in him because he’s a marathon runner and there are reports of these devices working very well in athletes and marathon runners.

Norcross: The other thing that was really important the uh since I’m pretty active that I knew I needed to get out of bed as soon as I could when I was stable enough and just to start moving and get it back to some degree of normalcy and they were always great about helping to disconnect me from all the tubes and stuff like that

so I could get up. I’ve just gradually worked up slowly, I mean I’m really fortunate that I’ve done a lot of training over the years and understand where I am now and the slow process it will take back to recovery so that’s been really helpful in terms of knowing how to balance uh my current fitness as well as the uh what it happened to me because it was pretty stressful on the body you know and of course not nothing that I would understand

until I actually went out and walked and then got fit enough so I could start doing some running as well

as walking. I think I’m fortunate that I was so fit that um you know when when I look at the statistics the survival rates of cardiac arrest they’re really low and so the only the big things that i believe were the success of my survival is one my initial fitness, second my wife was right there in that she called administered 911 as well as MEMS

who we’ve got were very blessed by having MEMs here in terms of their training their equipment and that they were close so they were able to get me to UAMS quickly I mean they were able to get my heart back in rhythm and then the quality of the care that I received here at UAMS.

Dr. Mounsey: Well we have expertise in implanting all kinds of pacemakers and defibrillators here and we have a lot of expertise in managing patients who’ve suffered a cardiac arrest we have a group of four specialists here

at UAMS and me who manage and help patients who’ve had cardiac arrests and help prevent cardiac arrests

in the wider population of people with heart disease who are at risk of cardiac arrests, and that requires a multi-disciplinary team approach, looking at all aspects of the patient’s health but also more specifically all aspects of the patient’s heart health and putting together a package of measures that will reduce the risk of cardiac arrest reduce the risk of cardiac arrest happening again.

Norcross: Since I’ve been back home, I’m trying to read up on what happened to me, what’s the treatment for all this and every time I look it’s like oh they did, that they did that, they did that that, so I know that although I wasn’t there at the time they did everything that they should have done in order to help me survive and recover from my

cardiac event.