Cameron T Knowles

Around 7 a.m. on March 26, Mark Knowles came home from an overnight shift at his part-time emergency medical technician job with the North Greece Fire Department. Coming in the door, he inadvertently set off the burglar alarm. He stopped at the bathroom to chat with his wife as she dressed for her job as a medical assistant at a Brighton cardiology office. They both wondered why Cameron, a first-grader at Greece’s Holmes Road Elementary School, hadn’t bounded out of his room when the alarm shrieked. “I thought I’d better go check on him, and it was time for him to get up for school anyway,” said Mark Knowles, 33. “When I got there, he wasn’t moving. At first I thought he was playing possum, ’cause he’s that kind of kid, but I checked for a pulse and didn’t find one.” He cried out to his wife, Rebecca, who ran in and probed Cameron’s neck and wrist for signs of life. “I said, “He’s gone, Mark, he’s gone,'” said Rebecca. She pulled her son’s lifeless, pajama-clad body from his bed and started CPR.

Mark dialed the Greece Ridge Fire Department, where he works full time as a dispatcher and emergency medical technician. “I said 10 words: ‘My son is unconscious, get a squad to my house,'” he said. The worst kind of call Firefighter Mark Quill and EMT Kevin Clarke pulled their rig up just minutes later. “Every call you go on is important, but when it’s someone you work with and a kid you see all the time at the firehouse visiting his dad, it’s different,” said Quill, a four-year member of the Fire Department. He’s been on dozens of cardiac arrest calls. There are few happy endings. “In this business, usually the worst calls are pediatric cardiac arrest,” said Clarke. Once inside the Knowles’ house, Quill hunkered down to deliver Cameron oxygen. Clarke hooked up an automated external defibrillator, or AED. Battalion Chief Andrew Paradiso assisted. It was the first time anyone from Greece Ridge ever used an AED on a child. “We gave him one shock, and kept up CPR, then a crew from Monroe Ambulance came,” said Quill. “They shocked him two more times and started pushing meds.” Cameron’s heart started to beat again. But, his father said, he’d been down at least 12 minutes, more than twice the five it can take to cause severe, irreversible brain damage. As medical professionals all their lives, both Mark and Rebecca — both certified EMTs — knew Cameron’s chances for full recovery were slim. “Everyone kept telling me at the hospital that I was a hero,” said Rebecca, 32. “But I didn’t know what kind of hero I was. We didn’t know if we’d saved his brain. I didn’t know what kind of life he would have, what decisions we would have to make.” Go Sox With Cameron’s heart pumping again, EMTs whisked him to Unity Hospital at Park Ridge, where doctors slipped a breathing tube down his throat while a pediatric intensive care unit team from Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong rushed from Rochester to Greece to retrieve him. Dr. Andrea Hinkle, a pediatric critical care fellow at Golisano, was part of that team. At first look, Cameron’s prognosis was grim. According to the American Heart Association, less than 7 percent of all children who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital survive long enough to ever be discharged from a hospital. When there is significant time without a heartbeat, fewer still ever regain normal brain function. “We were worried,” said Hinkle. Although Cameron’s heart was beating and he was breathing with assistance by the time he got to Park Ridge, she said, he was displaying some of the classic, jerky movements associated with brain trauma. “It is very rare for a child with cardiac arrest to survive intact.” Blood tests given later at Golisano, however, showed Cameron had enough circulation from the CPR and defibrillation to keep his kidneys and liver working. Like the brain, those organs also fail if deprived of oxygen too long during cardiac arrest. “Although the tests weren’t absolutely predictive, we didn’t see anything with his kidneys and liver,” said Hinkle. “That’s where we were beginning to become hopeful.” To help save Cameron’s brain, Golisano doctors sedated him heavily and slowed his metabolism by lowering his body temperature to 34 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit) for a day. Over an additional 14 hours, they slowly brought his body temperature back to a normal 37 degrees Celsius (about 99 degrees Fahrenheit.) Warmed up, on March 29 Cameron started fighting against his breathing tube. Mark returned from errands that afternoon to find his wife sobbing in Cameron’s room. “I was crying because I was happy,” said Rebecca. Watching Cameron awaken, nurse Staci Goldstein had asked two questions that left his parents no doubt their boy’s brain was OK. “She said, ‘Cameron, do you like the New York Yankees?’ and he shook his head no,” said Rebecca. “Then, she asked, ‘Do you like the Boston Red Sox?’ and he nodded yes.” Hinkle said Cameron’s quick acting parents and the first responders apparently kept the boy’s blood flowing well enough to prevent serious damage.

“He had a really excellent resuscitation by the first responders, and we have to give everybody a lot of credit,” Hinkle said, adding that she and Cameron bonded during his stay over their mutual love of the Red Sox. “But we deliver the same level of care even to Yankees fans.”thoughtful, caring boy Cameron, who returned full time to Holmes Road Elementary School this week, has a heart condition called long QT syndrome. The illness is a hereditary disorder of the heart’s electrical rhythm that affects the

time it takes for beating heart muscle to contract and then recover to beat again. The disorder, which usually affects children and young adults, can occur in otherwise healthy people and often shows no

symptoms until sudden cardiac death. That’s what happened to Cameron on the day now known as his “second birthday.” “Mommy,” he said. “You do so many nice things for me. Thank you for giving me CPR.”