A cheer mom saved her teenage daughter after a previously undiagnosed condition caused her to flatline during a cheerleading competition.
A North Carolina high school senior was getting ready to perform in a cheerleading competition in early March, when she had a medical emergency during a stunt.
Keianna Joe doesn’t have any memories from the day, but her teammates knew something was wrong when she was dismounting from a lift.
“I gripped onto my base and I didn’t let her go and that’s when they knew something was wrong and they slowly let me down to the ground,” Keianna said.
Her mother, Andrea Joe, a medical assistant, who was there for the performance ran to her fallen child and immediately felt for a pulse, but didn’t feel one.
“I am CPR-certified,” she told Good Morning America. “I’ve been trained on an AED device and I knew kind of at that moment that she needs this. This this has to be done and I know how to do it.”
“I just took over. I know CPR, I know how to do this. This is my baby and I have to save her,” Andrea said.
“I was like, ‘Come on, Keianna Come on. We’re not doing this. We’re not doing this today.’”
The gym was equipped with an AED, an automated external defibrillator, which Andrea was trained on, but had never used on a person before.
“I grabbed the pads and I just kind of ripped her uniform up over her head and threw the pads on her and hit the button,” she recalled.
“It said, ‘shock advised,’ and that was alarming because you train on these devices all the time and every time you train on them, they never deliver a shock because it’s not a live patient.”
When Keianna did not immediately respond, Andrea performed more CPR, which managed to revive her.
She was transported to Duke University Hospital, where doctors discovered she had gone into cardiac arrest.
A week later, she had surgery to implant a cardioverter defibrillator in her chest to automatically jumpstart her heart if it stops again.
Her team of doctors credit’s Andrea to saving her life by keeping oxygen to her brain with CPR.
“She’s probably alive because there was an AED on-site and her mom knew how to use it,” her cardiologist said.
“This is my healthy 17-year-old kid and it happened so fast,” Andrea remarked about the incident.
“One second she was up in the air, doing motions, smiling, laughing, and the next second she was unresponsive…. There were no signs, nothing.”
“You have to have the quick response and the knowledge to be able to respond to something that quickly, to be able to be of assistance,” she concluded.
A Florida family found out how true Andrea’s statement was, when their two-year-old drowned in the family pool at the beginning of this week.
The little girl was found floating face-down in an above-the-ground pool by a family member who was babysitting several of her siblings at the time.
When the family member called 911, a dispatcher dispensed life-saving CPR instructions that allowed them to keep the child alive until first responders were able to take over upon arrival.
The Volusia County Fire Rescue crew was able to resuscitate the child on the scene, where she remains in serious condition at a local hospital.
