Drew’s road to recovery:

• TODAY: Drew Brantley fights for life after his heart stops beating during gym class at Western High School.

• MONDAY: Relief comes in small doses for the Brantleys in the days following their son’s cardiac arrest.

• TUESDAY: Brantley owes his life to fast actions by Western’s staff and an automatic external defibrillator.





“They got the breathing tube out, he grabbed hold of me by the arm, pulled me in as close as he could and said, ‘Dad, I love you.’ Of course, I said that back. He said, ‘Am I going to live?’”

Wednesday, Feb. 17, 11:53 a.m.

Jeff Stout motions for Western High School teacher Alix Engle.

“He said there’s something seriously wrong and is motioning for me. ‘Get over here!’” Engle said.

It’s the final minutes of Engle’s athletic enhancement class and the students are finishing the day with a game of basketball. The play has gone toward the other basket and Drew Brantley is down on his own behind the play.

Brantley is shaking, convulsing perhaps. Engle’s first thought is a seizure. He sends students scurrying for help. Stout rips down to the main office.

Engle checks Brantley’s vitals.

“We check him for breathing and a pulse and whatnot, at that point, it was real faint, it was gasping for air,” Engle said.

Another student scrambles to get Western nurse Brenda Strunk.

“He got to the office door and he yelled ‘Drew. Seizure. South gym’ I grabbed my keys and radio and went running to the gym,” Strunk said.

Other faculty members, including liaison officer Deputy Wayne Ives and principal Rick Davis, arrive at her door at about the same time. The group sprints to the south gym.

When she arrives, Drew is unconscious and not breathing.

“I was like, this is not a seizure,” Strunk said. “I checked him for a pulse, I couldn’t find one, checked the other arm, couldn’t find one. I asked somebody to go get the AED and he was turning blue.”

Middle school nurse Amber Chambers and Ives move in quickly to help Strunk with CPR and they get the AED unit, an automatic external defibrillator, which is nearby, outside the gym. A graphic on the unit shows where to attach it on the patient — a patch on the upper right-hand side and one on the lower left. The AED then analyzes the patient, and a voice component gives recommendations.

The AED unit doesn’t pick up a heart rhythm and advises to deliver a shock. After the shock, the trio moves back in for more CPR as the unit analyzes further.

12:03 p.m.

An ambulance from Russiaville arrives, followed quickly by an ambulance from Howard Regional Health System. Medical personnel rush Brantley, a junior at Western, to Howard Regional.

“Not two minutes before [he collapsed], I saw him jump up and smack the backboard on a layup,” Engle said. “I was just so scared for him, so worried for him because you see a kid that has a lot of things going on for him, and one minute he’s up and smiling, and the next minute he’s down on the court. It scares you.

“Drew’s a strong kid, and he just kept fighting and fighting.”

12:10 P.M.

Brantley’s mom, Angie, gets out of work early on Wednesdays and is at the Kroger store on Kokomo’s south side when she gets a call from her mother-in-law, Linda. The school couldn’t get a hold of Angie or Brantley’s father, Ron, at work in a scramble to contact his parents.

At this point, they don’t yet know what has happened, outside of the first word, that Brantley had hit the floor and was shaking.

“I was just scared to death really, because I had no idea,” Angie Brantley said. “He’s never had any problems at all and I wasn’t sure, did he hit his head, have a seizure? No idea.”

Brantley suffered cardiac arrest, but they don’t know that yet.

Starting from just a few blocks north of the hospital, Angie Brantley pulls into the parking lot at Howard Regional before her son’s ambulance arrives at 12:19 p.m.

“Seems like forever,” she said of the wait until she saw him. “I actually beat the ambulance there. When I got there, I had been there maybe five minutes and they took me to a private room and brought the chaplain in. I had thoughts in my head then, and they weren’t good obviously.”

Angie had called Ron as soon as she got the call from Ron’s mother about their son. He had been eating lunch at work and was at the hospital about 10 minutes later.

“They already had her in a private room with a chaplain and they took me immediately back there to the same room, had a couple nurses running in and out, asking us questions, asking if he was allergic to anything, so on and so forth, basically trying to tell us the condition of Drew and what was going on,” Ron said. “We weren’t allowed back to see him at that point. I’m sure it was only 15 minutes or so. It seemed like an eternity.”

Doctors at Howard Regional perform a CAT scan and determine the problem is in his heart. They arrange for him to be airlifted via helicopter to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. Since Kokomo’s LifeLine helicopter is already out on a call, they call for the helicopter from the hospital in Rochester to take Brantley to Indianapolis.

As they wait, the Brantleys get about five minutes with their son. He has been sedated because, even in his state, he fights against the breathing tube inserted down his throat.

The sight is gut-wrenching.

“With everything hooked up, it wasn’t …” Ron said, searching for words to fit the images in his head. “TV doesn’t do that justice.”

Yet the sight of him, even this way, is better than the alternative.

“[The fear] was less than when I first got taken to that private room, because I knew he was alive, because that was my first fear was that he was dead,” Angie said. “So that fear was gone, but the fear was there that he was going to die.”

1:25 p.m.

Medical personnel load Brantley into the helicopter to go to Methodist and his parents begin heading down U.S. 31 toward Indianapolis. The hospital won’t let the Brantleys drive in their state of worry and shock, so Western athletic director Rick Fields drives them.

After they leave, the Brantleys have no communication with the hospital throughout the drive down, but the helicopter pilot takes Ron’s name and cell phone number before takeoff — just in case. When Fields and the Brantleys reach 96th Street on Indy’s north side, the pilot calls to say they’ve arrived at Methodist and their son remained stable the entire time. He is now in the emergency room.

2:20 p.m.

By the time his parents arrive at Methodist Hospital on 16th Street, there is little in Brantley’s condition. When he reached the emergency room at 2:02 p.m., he was still sedated and still stable. Most of the time, a doctor and two or three nurses remain close by, monitoring him.

Within 15 minutes, his parents are taken to the emergency room.

“At the emergency room, they let him wake up just barely, enough to make sure he could squeeze a nurse’s hand and he could push with his feet when asked,” Ron said. “When they got that out of him, they put him back to sleep. They asked him to look at his mom and dad. His eyes are half closed, he looked in our direction, and that made us feel a little better.”

A little. Not a lot.

The situation is too fragile.

11:30 p.m.

Brantley was admitted to the pediatric cardio unit in the afternoon and taken from the ER to a room where his parents stay with him. Late in the evening, Brantley demonstrates he can breathe on his own and his breathing tube is removed. Shortly thereafter, doctors decide to let the sedation wear off and wake him up.

“When they started letting him wake up, he had the breathing tube,” Ron said. “I just remember him being just petrified. I can see that look in my head. I don’t know how to describe that. Just petrified.”

Brantley sees his hospital room, but doesn’t know where he is or what is happening. He needs answers.

It’s difficult for Ron to talk about it.

“Let’s see if I can get through this,” Ron said, struggling with his emotions as he recounted it. “They got the breathing tube out. He grabbed hold of me by the arm, pulled me in as close as he could and said ‘Dad, I love you.’ Of course I said that back.

“He said, ‘Am I going to live?’ And I said, ‘I promise you’re going to be fine.’”

Drew Brantley doesn’t remember any of this.