Blog Home

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.

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., claiming the lives of nearly 300,000 people every year. But what do you really know about this killer that often strikes without warning?

Big shout out today to Kelly Walton, a school nurse in South Carolina who used an AED to save the life of a fellow employee. Sammy Moorman, a cafeteria worker at Foster Park Elementary School, was outside breaking down cardboard boxes and singing a song on the morning of March 24. After a while, his co-workers realized that the singing had stopped. When they went outside to check on him, they found Moorman lying unconscious, collapsed on top of the boxes he had been working on.

The NHL faced a scary moment last week when Dallas Stars forward Rich Peverley collapsed on the bench in the middle of a game. But had it not been for an AED and well-trained early responders, that scary moment may very well have ended in tragedy.