Northcote mum Suzi Young was enjoying a community gardening day when she suddenly fell to her knees and collapsed on the ground.
Within seconds she was unresponsive – not breathing and without a pulse – as shocked family and friends rushed to her aid.
A fellow volunteer called 000 and began CPR as Suzi’s distraught husband and young son watched on in horrified disbelief.
At just 38 years of age, Suzi was having a cardiac arrest – when the heart suddenly stops beating – and owes her life to the emergency treatment she received in those first crucial minutes.
As well as receiving immediate CPR, a GoodSAM responder rushed to the scene and worked with firefighters to continue chest compressions and shock Suzi’s heart with a defibrillator until paramedics arrived.
“There was no warning,” Suzi said. “I had just taken a photo and then I literally just dropped. There was a moment where I came to and I remember this sensation of fighting for my life and the chaos. Other than that, I just remember waking up in ICU and realising something big had happened.”
Suzi is now a member of the Shock Squad™, a Melbourne support group made up of people who’ve survived cardiac arrests thanks to quick-thinking bystanders.
After being given a second chance at life, they’re paying it forward and working with a local charity, Community First Responders Australia, to educate and empower others to recognise and respond to medical emergencies until professional help arrives.
Two other squad members, Andrew and Steve, were both successfully resuscitated with the help of strangers when they had cardiac arrests while cycling and were seen falling to the ground.
“It’s crazy when you hear other people’s stories and you realise how lucky everyone is,” Suzi, now 43, said.
“The thing we all feel is that we’re not only alive, we’re very alive and not suffering from chronic illnesses. That’s the other statistic that is scary to think about, all the people who end up with acquired brain injuries.”
Every year in Australia, about 26,000 people have out-of-hospital cardiac arrests – that’s 70 a day – and only about 10 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women survive.
That’s because when the heart stops beating, it is critical to receive good-quality chest compressions and defibrillation within the first few minutes to keep vital organs alive – which is often before emergency services arrive.
Many cardiac arrests happen in people’s homes, but delayed responses from loved ones not trained in first-aid and limited access to defibrillators contributes to poor outcomes.
That’s where the Shock Squad comes in. The group, which now has 10 members, is the brainchild of Gwyn Nichols and Leon Landau, who founded Community First Responders Australia.
The first-aid trainers recognised that low survival rates from cardiac arrests could easily be improved at a community level with basic training and more defibrillators in public places.
So far, they have raised almost $100,000 to put 31 defibrillators – or Shock Stations – in public places so they are accessible 24-hours a day, and provided first-aid training for more than 6500 people in those neighbourhoods.
The Shock Stations are linked to Ambulance Victoria and the GoodSAM app, so when someone calls 000 an immediate community response can be activated before paramedics arrive.
Through their work, Gwyn and Leon met survivors of cardiac arrests and formed the Shock Squad to help spread their resuscitation message.
Suzi now has a Shock Station on her front fence for public use and a team of neighbours who have been trained to perform CPR and use the defibrillator.
“We came together to meet other survivors and then realised there’s actually a really simple solution to enable more people to survive cardiac arrests and be here to tell their stories,” Suzi said.
“That’s the model that Gwyn and Leon have envisaged – having community first responders and having access to defibs.”
Shock Squad members Andrew and Steve both had heart attacks that caused their cardiac arrests, but Suzi’s was the result of an underlying heart condition that she inherited called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
She now has an implanted defibrillator inside her chest, which went off three months after her first arrest, but has not auto-activated since then.
After finding the right medications to keep her stable, and with the help of medical experts, Suzi went onto have another child and feels blessed to be living a happy and healthy life with her husband Ross and two sons Alex and Jack.
“You process this stuff for a long time afterwards, and you continue to process it, which is why the Shock Squad has been such an interesting group, just in terms of the social/emotional stuff,” Suzi said.
“The physical stuff, you’re fine, you’re alive, but then there’s a lot of other processing that everyone tries to grapple with.
“I did worry for a long time afterwards, and you go through all the different scenarios that could happen, but I’ve got my confidence back now.”
For more information on the Shock Squad™, visit Community First Responders Australia:
Home – Community First Responders Australia
First-aid trainers add breasts and bras to dummies to fix resuscitation gender gap – Sister Sally
HEART ATTACK v CARDIAC ARREST
- A heart attack and a cardiac arrest are different things, but a heart attack can go on to cause a cardiac arrest.
- In simple terms, a heart attack is a plumbing problem, while a cardiac arrest is an electrical problem.
- A heart attack occurs when the arteries that supply blood to the heart become narrowed or blocked. This means that less blood – and therefore less oxygen – is delivered to the heart muscle and it becomes damaged and dies. As the heart muscle dies, it stops being able to effectively pump blood to the rest of the body.
- Common symptoms of a heart attack are: pain and tightness in the chest; pain that spreads to the arm, jaw, neck and back; trouble breathing; feeling faint; nausea and anxiety.
- A cardiac arrest occurs when the electrical signals that tell the heart when to contract (pump blood) and relax (fill with blood) malfunction. This causes the heart to stop beating, or stop beating effectively.
- A person having a cardiac arrest will suddenly fall unconscious, have no pulse and stop breathing.
- Early CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, or chest compressions) and early defibrillation (shock therapy) are essential to surviving a cardiac arrest. Death can happen within minutes because vital organs are not getting enough oxygen.
- Heart diseases, such as heart attacks, are the most common cause of cardiac arrest, but they can also be caused by non-cardiac issues, known as the 4 Hs and 4 Ts.
- The 4 Hs: hypoxia (lack of oxygen), hypovolemia (loss of blood/fluid volume), hypo/hyperthermia (low or high body temperature), and hypo/hyperkalaemia (low or high potassium levels).
- The 4 Ts: toxins (drugs/poisons); tension pneumothorax (build-up of air around lungs), tamponade (build-up of fluid around heart), thrombosis (blood clot in heart or lungs).
