Former salesman makes pitch about heart disease, survival

By L.A. Chung San Jose Mercury News

Dwight Mensinger talks readily about the day he died three years ago. The way he sees it, it’s a chance to talk about living. The former salesman, who now volunteers for the American Heart Association, will talk until the cows come home - about preventing heart attacks or the sudden cardiac arrest that felled him.

But what people really want to know was whether he “saw the light” that day he died, mid-argument with his boss. You know, that blinding, white light? That light depicted in movies and books when one crosses over into death? Did he see angels, they ask? Or long-dead relatives? After all, how often do you talk to someone who came back?

That day was Feb. 2, 2004, and Mensinger, 5-foot-9, 252 pounds, and a 2 1/2-pack-a-day smoker, had just taken a cigarette break at 10 a.m. He was back in a contentious sales meeting with his boss, feuding over a customer’s treatment.”I collapsed right in front of her,” he said. She started screaming. A dozen co-workers gathered around him, paralyzed in shock, until a 21-year-old staffer, a college kid, took charge. Like many, she had never learned CPR, but she put the 911 dispatcher on speaker phone and worked like a fiend, fueled by adrenaline, until paramedics arrived six minutes later.

Mensinger was lucky - he awoke at the Fremont-Kaiser hospital emergency room at 3 p.m. - but he wasn’t safe. He had another cardiac arrest that week, then a quadruple bypass. Hospitalized for a month, he had time to think. He visited the paramedics who saved him. He keeps track of the young woman who kept him in this world.”How do you thank someone who saved your life?” he said. You can’t, really. He also came to grips with a new reality. Mensinger, 51, now walks with a cane. And because of damage to his short-term memory, his family no longer lets him cook.

They’ve also had to adjust to getting by on less, living off his wife’s salary and his disability allotment. But once you’ve had a second chance at life, he said, your priorities are different. A talker all his life, he says he’s also learned how to listen. Particularly to kids. He dedicated himself to educating people on preventing heart attacks and cardiac arrests, and to preparing people to be heroes, like the 21-year-old woman who saved him. He volunteers for paramedic groups, speaks for the American Heart Association, meets with politicians from Sacramento to Washington.

Recently, Mensinger visited San Jose Councilman Kansen Chu. The two have worked together to spread the word about heart disease. Chu conducted a demonstration on the AED or automatic external defibrillator - which provides a shock to get your heart beating properly - for his staff. He was reeling off stats: That a victim has six minutes to be defibrillated, that after 10 minutes the chance of survival is almost nil. That women are half the victims. Help is on the wall The staff wondered how fast paramedics would come, if one of them collapsed on the 18th floor of San Jose City Hall. They didn’t realize that an AED was hanging in the hall. People like Mensinger have pushed to put them in public places. That’s because he always remembers that February day.

So just what did he see, as he lay clinically dead, turning purple on the ground? “Peaceful blackness,” he said. There’s a difference, he says, between peaceful blackness and not remembering what happened. He calls it being reborn. “Before, I was alive,” Mensinger said. “Now, I’m living.”

Jogger is alive because strangers knew CPR

By Sandra Gonzales San Jose Mercury News

Claire Welgan could have been jogging anywhere that morning nine days ago. But she chose the Los Gatos Creek Trail - and that just might have saved her life.
She was jogging alone there Jan. 18 when her heart stopped. She crashed so hard to the ground that her face bled. That’s when Nicole Eden and Leslie Eichler saw her.
They felt her pulse. She wasn’t breathing. They rolled her over. And for the next seven nerve-racking minutes, they prayed and administered CPR on the 23-year-old Welgan.
“It was really frightening to know that her life could end right in front of me,” said Eichler, 30, a San Jose educator and mother. “I felt so responsible for her that moment, even though she was a complete stranger.”
Paramedics soon arrived and Welgan was taken to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, where doctors said she suffered from ventricular fibrillation - a condition in which the heart fails to adequately pump blood.
“My daughter is alive thanks to these women,” said Dennis Welgan, speaking on behalf of his daughter. His daughter remains hospitalized and is suffering from short-term memory loss. She remembers little to nothing from that day, he said.
But for Eden and Eichler it remains a stark memory.
Though trained in CPR, neither Eden nor Eichler had ever applied the technique - at least not to save someone. Eichler said she was certified years ago because it was required of her as an educator. “I realize now it’s more than just a requirement,

it can save a person’s life,” Eichler said.
Eden, 37, of San Jose, is a registered nurse at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. Still, she never expected to be in that situation.
In fact, Eden and Eichler had just met that day as part of a group of mothers who jog with their children in strollers. Eden, with a 6-week-old daughter, hadn’t been on the trail in months.
But something tugged at her that day and somehow she ended up with the group.
“If it was going to happen, I’m glad it happened this way,” Eden said. Now, Eden and Eichler have become fast friends. They also met the Welgan family three days after the incident.
“It’s kind of miracle that all those things were lined up that day,” Eden said. “We were the right kind of people to be passing by that day.”

AED Use Urged to Save Children’s Lives

By Ed Edelson HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Oct. 29 (HealthDay News) — The emergency defibrillators now commonly found in airports and other public places that have saved thousands of adult cardiac arrest victims can also save the lives of children.
That’s the new position of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which is reminding its members — and other physicians as well — that the devices can safely be used on children younger than 8 years old.
“As AED [automated external defibrillator] programs expand, pediatricians must advocate on behalf of children so that their needs are accounted for,” said an AAP policy statement in the November issue of Pediatrics. The statement was released Monday during the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting in San Francisco.
Recent studies have shown that children do experience ventricular fibrillation, a potentially fatal condition in which the heart fails to contract properly. And, while the use of defibrillators to save a child’s life by providing an electrical jolt has been advocated for several years, the “software on AEDs has become more extensive and validated for children, and attenuation devices have become available to downregulate the energy delivered by AEDs to allow their use on children,” the statement said.
Dr. Steven E. Krug, chairman of the academy’s committee on pediatric emergency medicine and a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said, the “overall incidence of ventricular fibrillation has been underestimated. It used to be thought that it was fairly uncommon in children. We now know that a fairly significant number of children have arrhythmias that need defibrillation.”
The academy said the new report was being issued, because “there is a need for developing strategies to provide defibrillation to children younger than 8 years.”
Fibrillation deaths “are rare events in children, but are moderately common in children who die cardiac deaths,” particularly in school-age children, said Dr. Steven Neish, director of the pediatric fellowship program at Baylor University, who participated in preparing the policy statement.
“One area we worry about is young athletes who die of arrhythmias,” Neish said. “The argument is about how common is common enough, and how cheap is cheap enough” to warrant the cost of a defibrillator, he said. With emergency defibrillators now commonly priced at about $1,000, “in comparison to other treatments, it makes a good case for defibrillators as preventive treatment.”
Placing a defibrillator in a school also makes it available to school personnel and visitors, Neish pointed out.
“Also, at least as important is to more broadly teach people cardiopulmonary resuscitation,” he said. “We have to make people comfortable with the procedure.”
There are defibrillators designed specifically for use in children, Krug said, but concerns that adult defibrillators could damage children’s hearts have disappeared.
“There has been an advance in the technology,” Krug said. “Even in a situation where you can provide only an adult dose, that still may be better than doing nothing.”
As with adults, defibrillation of children experiencing a problem must be done quickly, Krug said. “Time is of the essence,” he said. “As time passes, the chance of resuscitation decreases rapidly.”
The likelihood of survival decreases by 7 percent to 10 percent with each minute of delay to defibrillation after cardiac arrest, the AAP statement said.
The first recommendation contained in the academy’s statement is that “strategies and equipment availability for treatment of pediatric arrest should be focused on shortening the intervals from collapse to recognition of ventricular fibrillation and to defibrillation.”
Another recommendation is that any community public-access defibrillation program use devices capable of treating children. And any program to place defibrillators in schools should include staff training in basic first-aid and resuscitation and should be integrated with the local emergency medical system, the academy recommended.