A student's perspective: spurred by tragedy, a high school senior joins the defibrillator crusade - community champion

School Administrator, Oct, 2003 by Shannon Bulger

Not much happens in my hometown of Sammamish, Washington. So when Sean Shipler, a 14-year, old football star, went into sudden cardiac arrest in the middle of gym class, it had a major impact on the community. There was no AED at the school, and although people did CPR, it took 10 minutes for the paramedics to arrive with a defibrillator. Sean lived, but he suffered permanent neurological damage.

I was a junior that year, and although I hardly knew Sean, I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened. I envisioned him lying comatose, not dead, but hardly alive. I pictured his mother holding his hand, remembering the last words he had said to her that day before he left for school. I imagined his father, torn between work and family, desperately encouraging the doctors to do more.

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I called Sean's father, Chris, a couple of weeks later and offered to help however I could. He told me about defibrillation and how Sean could have been saved if an AED had been available quickly. He told me about the battle building between the school district's risk-management team and concerned parents who knew the importance of public-access defibrillation.

After doing some research, I learned that four or five middle- and high-school students in the Puget Sound area had gone into sudden cardiac arrest in the past couple of years alone. Sean was the only one who had survived.

That's when I got involved as an AED advocate. We started out with rallies in parking lots, trying to get people fired up, but we didn't really have any turnout. We walked from homeroom to homeroom to talk about the cause. We had a potluck banquet with a couple of speakers giving talks about defibrillators, and we raised a lot of money and got some media coverage, too. We didn't have permission from the school district to do some of these things--in fact, the risk-management team tried to block our efforts--but we did it anyway and didn't get in trouble.

My family joined in the AED crusade, hosting training seminars and planning fundraisers, trying to install AEDs in the local junior and high schools. It took a couple of years, .but eventually we got AEDs into all of the junior and senior highs in the Lake Washington and Issaquah school districts.

My experience in working with the AED community has been life-changing. I'm proud that I made time and got involved in something that really matters. Some day, I'd like to work as a lobbyist for public access to defibrillation. If I'm successful, many families will be spared the grief and frustration that so many have already experienced.

Shannon Bulger is now a sophomore at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She was recently honored by NCED for her work in advocating public-access AED programs.