February is Heart Month: The Importance of AEDs and CPR

February is Heart Month: The Importance of AEDs and CPR

Danny Witbeck was running sprints at his Jan. 2021 Evart High School Varsity Boys Basketball practice, like any practice before. Everything was normal, until it wasn’t.

“My legs started getting tired,” says Witbeck. “It was something I never experienced before. My chest felt really heavy.”

Then Witbeck collapsed onto the floor, going into cardiac arrest. His coach, Kris Morgan, recalls Witbeck’s breathing was heavy and he went unresponsive.

“Then his breathing pretty much stopped,” says Morgan. “So at that point, my assistant coach called 9-1-1. I told the boys to grab the AED. They ran over just over here and grabbed the AED, brought it back to him.”

An AED, or automatic external defibrillator, saved Witbeck’s life that day. It’s a device that’s not legally required at places like public schools, but is critical in cases such as this.

“I can’t even think about what would happen if we didn’t have the AED here,” says Morgan. “The doctor down in DeVos, he said that the AEDs are the thing that saved him. We can do CPR all you want, the whole day long, but if his heart’s out of rhythm, then CPR is not going to get it back into rhythm. You can keep him going, but it’s that AED that saved him.”

Cardiac arrest is a life-threatening emergency that impacts over 350, 000 Americans of all ages each year. 90% of out-of-hospital cases end in death.

Organizations such as Wes Leonard Heart Team in southwest Michigan are on a mission to prevent deaths from cardiac arrest by providing AEDs to schools and kids’ activity groups.

The foundation started in honor of Wesley Leonard, who passed away in March 2011 from cardiac arrest during a game. They’ve provided over 450 AEDs since starting.

“Providing these [are] making people aware of what they’re looking at and that situation. How to use the AED is the only thing that’s going to help improve that 90 percent number,” says Wesley Leonard’s coach Ryan Klingler. “It’s going to be a normal person like yourself or me that’s going to be in one of those situations where we don’t know how to do CPR. We’ve got to know where an AED is and if we can get to it in time and not be afraid to put it on someone, even if they don’t need it.”

CPR is still a helpful skill to have while awaiting an AED or emergency services.

In 2017, Senate Bill 647 went into affect, requiring schools to teach CPR training and AED usage as part of the health education curriculum.

Danny Witbeck says if it wasn’t for the training his classmates had, or the school’s AED, he doesn’t know if he’d still be here today.

Witbeck is currently playing baseball at Northwood University after graduating last spring.