Around 4 p.m. on December 13, 2011, Justin Repshas's girlfriend dropped him off at his studio apartment in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The couple arranged to meet for dinner later and then study for finals at the college library. Meantime, Repshas, 22, told her, he'd take a nap or go running.
That April, Repshas had completed Charleston's premier 10K road race, the Cooper River Bridge Run, in a time of 44:20. Most often these days, however, he ran just to cope with the stress of college life. "I had this little 3-mile route I'd take," Repshas recalls. "It went down a heavily traveled road and then cut over to a quieter street."
Shortly after his girlfriend left, he laced up. "I vaguely remember heading out my door," he says. "My next memory was waking up in a hospital bed."
Most of us have been schooled ad naseum about cardiovascular plumbing catastrophes. Chief among these is the classic heart attack, or myocardial infarction, which typically happens when a piece of cholesterol-laden plaque ruptures and causes a clot to form in a coronary artery, quickly starving the heart muscle of oxygen-rich blood.
Less well known but equally lethal is sudden cardiac arrest, or SCA. This is a catastrophic malfunction of your heart's electrical system, a finely tuned series of electrochemical signals that keeps your heart chambers squeezing and relaxing in coordinated rhythm. When something bollixes up these signals, your pump isn't able to circulate blood effectively. Within seconds, your brain is deprived of oxygen and you collapse...
"There are pockets, such as Seattle and Rochester, Minnesota, where rates of being discharged with intact neurologic function are now 60 to 70 percent," says the Mayo Clinic's Dr. Todd Miller. "In Rochester, for instance, the police department, fire department, and paramedics have a contest among them to see who can reach a victim first with their defibrillator. The response times are very short."
But for those whose hearts have arrested, even "very short" can be too long. According to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, every minute a victim goes without CPR and defibrillation, the chance of survival dips by 7 to 10 percent.
SOURCE: Jim Thorton, Men's Health