At AEDs Today, we always enjoy
sharing stories of lives saved by AEDs. Today, however, we are sharing a much
more somber tale.
Jordan Boyd, a 16-year-old hockey
player from Nova Scotia, died after going into cardiac arrest due to an
undiagnosed heart condition at a youth team training camp last August.
It’s a tragedy we’ve seen many
times before, but it becomes no easier to deal with. A young athlete’s life
suddenly cut short always brings with it feelings of shock, sadness, and
disbelief.
But now, new information has come
to light that makes Boyd’s death even harder to swallow.
No
AED was used on Boyd until after the paramedics arrived, about ten minutes
after he collapsed. This was despite a league requirement that all rinks be
outfitted with one.
In the first minutes immediately
following his collapse, bystanders reportedly treated it as a simple fainting
case. It wasn’t until three minutes into the call with the dispatcher that
they began to treat it as cardiac arrest and CPR was reportedly administered.
Despite also being instructed to
use an AED if one was available, however, the paramedics who arrived on the
scene would later report that they saw no evidence of an AED being used.
Boyd would be pronounced dead at
the hospital not long after.
We must be clear: In no way can
anyone claim that Boyd would definitely be alive if someone had used an AED on
him. There is no “magic bullet” for cardiac arrest that brings the survival
rate to 100%.
However, we can say that Jordan
Boyd was not given the best possible chance to survive.
We’ve
talked before about the survival rates of cardiac arrest compared to the
time it takes for an AED to be used. If an AED is used in the first five
minutes, the victim’s odds of survival jump to 90%, up from 5% if no AED is
used.
For every minute that passes
without defibrillation, the survival rate drops 7-10%.
There’s no way to say for certain
that Jordan Boyd’s life would have been saved, but it sure would have given him
a chance.
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