Cloquet ninth-grader puts CPR training to the test – to save his little sister

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Cloquet ninth-grader Kody Mickle just completed CPR training in his Cloquet High School health class at the end of October.

“I never thought I’d have to use it, though,” he admitted.

On Sunday, Jan. 8, he did – and it hit much closer to home than he ever expected.

Kody, his dad Dave, his mother Denise and his 2-year-old sister Kenadie had just come home from the kids’ grandmother’s house Sunday, Jan. 8, around 1 p.m.

“Denise was in the garage taking out the garbage, and I was inside with the kids,” related Dave. “We were getting ready to build a fort in the living room. Kenadie was just around the corner in the kitchen looking at the electronic picture frame when I heard a thump, like she’d fallen down. When I came around the corner I found her face down and not moving.”

He rushed in to check on the little girl to see if she was OK. He said he had just given her a little piece of orange, and he didn’t know if she’d tripped and fallen, or if she was choking on something that caused her to fall. Then, he turned her over and realized she was having a seizure.

“She was looking up at me, but her whole body was shaking,” he related. “I yelled to my wife, who ran in from the garage and asked what had happened. I told her I didn’t know, that this was the way I had found her.”

Kenadie was still breathing at the time, and Denise immediately called 911 and then went outside to meet the ambulance. Dave was alone with Kenadie when she quit breathing.

“I kept running in and out to check on her,” said Denise, “and this time when I came in, I could see she wasn’t breathing. I knew that Kody had just completed a CPR course in school, so I ran downstairs and got him.”

“I didn’t know what was going on,” said Kody, picking up the story line. “I ran upstairs and saw Dad with Kenadie. Since she had stopped breathing, I said, ‘We’ve got to do CPR!’”

“She was blue and lifeless in my arms by that time,” continued Dave. “With the total panic I was in, I wasn’t thinking straight. I knew she wasn’t breathing, but I wasn’t doing anything about it.”

Kody quickly tilted his sister’s head back, opened up her air passages and pinched her nose shut. Then he instructed Dave to begin chest compressions and rescue breaths. In only moments, Kenadie coughed and started breathing again.

“It was a team effort,” said Kody.

Deputy Tony Bastien of the Carlton County Sheriff’s Department arrived right about then, since he was just down the street at the time the 911 call came in.

Though Kenadie had begun breathing on her own by then, she continued to lapse in and out of consciousness.

“It seemed like it took forever for the ambulance to get here, because we were all just frantic,” said Denise, “but it was actually only about four minutes.”

As soon as the ambulance arrived, the paramedics hooked Kenadie up to oxygen and got her ready to go.

“She was really tired because a seizure wears you out, and all she wanted to do was sleep,” said Denise. “She didn’t open her eyes all the way to the hospital. Once they shut the doors of the ambulance behind us after we got there, she finally opened them.”

After Kenadie arrived at Community Memorial Hospital, the doctors ran her through a number of tests, did a CT scan and a chest X-ray and discovered she had pneumonia.

“She’d had a cough earlier,” related Denise, “but when Dave had taken her to her pediatric doctor in Duluth earlier in the week, she told him it was a cold and it just had to run its course. When we were at my mom’s house earlier [the day of the seizure], my mom commented that she thought Kenadie felt warm so we checked her temperature and it was 101 degrees. We gave her an Ibuprofen and thought the fever would take its course following the medicine.”

It turned out that what Kenadie had suffered was a febrile seizure, sometimes brought on in infants and toddlers by a high fever. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, during a febrile seizure a child often loses consciousness and shakes, usually moving limbs on both sides of the body. Most occur during the first day of a child’s fever and last a minute or two, although some can be as brief as a few seconds or sometimes more than 15 minutes. Approximately one in every 25 children will have at least one febrile seizure.

After doctors at CMH were assured that all was well, they put Kenadie on antibiotics and sent her home – four and a half hours after her trauma had first begun. Since then, she’s been back for a checkup and has been fine ever since.

This was the first of any kind of major illness or emergency the little girl has ever had in her short lifetime, and her family said they have learned a lot from it.

“We want to make sure other parents know that, for children anywhere from six months to 5 years old, a high fever can trigger seizures,” said Dave. “It’s not uncommon. I think if we had known, it might have gone a little smoother. If other parents know this is possible, hopefully it won’t be as frightening as it was for us and they’ll know what to do.”

Now, both Dave and Denise want to become certified in CPR as well. Kody took the course as part of his ninth-grade health class, taught by instructor Brenda Bender, and he availed himself of the option of paying an extra $10 to get certified in it as well.

“We practiced with both an adult-size Resusci-Annie and a child-size Resusci-Annie,” he explained, “and we learned how to recognize signs of an emergency and use CPR if someone is having a heart attack, if they stop breathing or if they’re choking.”

Bender said she has taught the unit on CPR all 15 years she’s been with the district, but she thinks the class has been taught for longer than that. She said the unit spans some three to four weeks and includes first aid and sections on adult, child and infant CPR. All students are required to take the health class, of which this unit is a part, prior to graduation. Some students, such as Kody, also avail themselves of the additional option to take the testing to become certified in CPR.

“The whole purpose of the unit is to give anyone the basics what to do if someone is choking or has stopped breathing,” said Bender. “You hope they take it seriously and learn something.”

Recently, the American Heart Association began a push to have CPR training made mandatory for all high school students in the United States, and several Minnesota state legislators are planning to introduce just such a bill during their 2012 session.

“They absolutely should,” said Denise.

Bender agrees.

“It’s something that could save people’s lives,” she attested, “so it’s a good thing to make available in school. You hope that during your lifetime you won’t have to use it, but if you do, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge you need.”

Kody admitted that he’s only told a few of his friends at school what happened at their house that Sunday and his role in helping to possibly save his little sister’s life.

“I pretty much just told them I’d had a bad weekend...” he said modestly.

“It was a bad weekend,” interjected Denise, “but it turned out to be a good weekend – because you helped save Kenadie.”

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