At Barry Park, a homecoming: Girl
returns to visit soccer team - and coach who saved her life
Jade
McKenney at Barry Park with Ted Straub, the Nottingham High School modified
soccer coach who saved Jade's life when she went into cardiac arrest. (McKenney
family | Submitted photo)
The homecoming was at Barry
Park, bringing everything full circle. Coach Ted Straub was on the sidelines,
watching his Nottingham High School modified girls team compete with Central
Square in soccer, when he turned and saw one of his players approaching, in
street clothes.
It was the first time
12-year-old Jade McKenney had been to the park since she'd left by ambulance in
September, after going into cardiac arrest.
"Thanks, Coach,"
said Jade, who gave Straub a hug.
For a minute, no one was
thinking about soccer.
"My starters were all
out on the field," said Straub, who'd also visited Jade in the hospital,
"and at the end of the first quarter they were so happy to see her I was
afraid they were going to trample her."
That was Oct. 16 -- exactly
36 days after Jade finished a routine day of classes at the Edward Smith School
and then went to Barry Park for soccer practice. Jade asked Straub if she could
run an extra lap to warm up, and the rest of the team had started on a drill
when a couple of players began screaming that Jade had collapsed.
Straub ran to her. Jade
wasn't breathing. She had no pulse. Straub, a physical education teacher at
McKinley-Brighton Elementary School, handed his cell phone to Priscilla
Fudesco, a 13-year-old team captain, and asked her to call 911.
Then he began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation as he'd been
trained to do it:
Straub got on his knees,
lined up his shoulders above his hands, placed one hand above the other and put
them on Jade's chest.
Thirty compressions. Two
breaths. Repeat.
That reaction, doctors would later say, saved Jade's life.
That reaction, doctors would later say, saved Jade's life.
A fellow coach, Joe Horan,
ran to Straub's side. Two nurses who'd been driving past, Don Paradise and
Michele Gulla, stopped to help. Straub kept going. Three minutes after Fudesco
made her call, Lt. Paul Schaap and firefighter Steve Segur of the Syracuse Fire
Department arrived at the park. They gave Jade a shock with a defibrillator.
The child responded with a
groan. She began struggling to breathe.
By the next day, from the
hospital, she sent a message of support to her team - and an apology for
disrupting the practice.
Jade's mother, Diane Wright
McKenney, said specialists determined a valve had failed in Jade's heart. On
Oct. 3, doctors performed surgery on the child at Strong Memorial Hospital in
Rochester. They inserted a mechanical valve. They discovered her right coronary
artery had basically been inoperative, which is why she collapsed. By rerouting
the left artery, they solved the problem.
"The doctor has been
saying (this surgery) is one and done," said Wright McKenney, who is
constantly aware of how difficult the entire struggle would be for anyone, much
less a 12-year-old: This is the second straight year, for instance, that Jade
will be curtailed for Halloween, always a special time for a child. A year ago
right now, Jade had a broken foot.
Yet in the long run, Wright
McKenney said, everything looks good: Within seven or eight months, Jade should
be ready to play again on the soccer field and cleared for ballet.
Most important, when she
takes the field for Straub next autumn, she'll be free of any medical concern
that what happened last month might happen again.
Those who love Jade never
forget what the doctors said after her collapse: In a case of cardiac arrest
far from medical help, survival hinges on an almost miraculous sequence of
reactions.
Chief among them: someone
performing near-perfect CPR.
Straub remains a little
stunned by the community response. He took a call from a man who said he saved
his wife by doing CPR in the same way he'd read that Straub did it. Fellow
coaches have told him they're looking into refresher courses and more training, to make sure
they'd know what to do in the same situation. American Heart Association officials called to
say they'd like to find a way "to keep the ball rolling."
As for the soccer team, Jade
came to a couple of games and to a team party at the end of the season, where
she met Straub's wife, Stephanie, and their young daughters, Emily and Jocelyn.
Out of appreciation, the
McKenneys -- David and Diane and daughters Jade and Jett -- presented Straub
with a one-night family package to a Syracuse University basketball game that a
neighbor had insisted on giving them, after their trial. The coach accepted
with one promise: He wants to bring Jade, as a guest.
The modified team won a
single game this autumn, but the players -- bonded by concern for Jade -- grew
especially close. Straub said the season was a success in all the ways middle
school sports ought to be:
"The girls were there to
learn," he said, "and to have fun and be safe."
Next year, Jade fully intends
to be a part of that again.
