“They were laughing and it just felt so good to hear him with his two best friends. I told Ron, ‘Last week at this time, I didn’t know if I’d ever get to hear him do that again.’”

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 24

Drew Brantley woke up in his own bed for the first time in a week. No doctors. No nurses. No tubes, wires, monitors.

Everything normal?

Still two fretting parents.

Not quite completely normal, but better, much better.

A week after suffering cardiac arrest while playing basketball in school, Brantley and his parents, Angie and Ron, were back at home from Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. His chest hurt, he couldn’t raise his elbow above his shoulder, and he was going stir crazy, but he was alive.

It was an acceptable trade.

“I never would have thought that this would have happened,” he said. “Waking up in a hospital bed after this was crazy. It still hasn’t hit me that it happened, but it will soon.”

Reminders are regular. On Feb. 22, he had surgery to implant a pacemaker/ defibrillator in his chest. Until the surgical site heals, he’s not supposed to raise his elbow above his shoulder. If he does, he feels it.

“If it gets close to that point, I can really tell,” Brantley said. “It pulls on the incision and there’s a wire inside that. You can tell it’s pulling it. Immediately, my arm drops.”

Recovery is also regular. Each day brings more slices of normality.

And just like when he was in the hospital, it’s therapeutic when friends visit.

On Feb. 24, Damon Reel and Jared Householder were visiting and for a moment, the Brantley household sounded exactly as it was supposed to.

“They were laughing and it just felt so good to hear him with his two best friends,” said Angie. “I told Ron, ‘Last week at this time, I didn’t know if I’d ever get to hear him do that again.’

“It’s a great thing to hear that.”

Ron said that after Angie’s observation, “We both kind of cried for a little bit.” It was a reminder of “how close we came” to losing their son.

It’s not easy to talk about, but it’s necessary for them. The Brantleys decided while their son was still in the hospital that they needed to tell the story, not just of life nearly lost and the relief of recuperation, but how and why he is alive and ticking.

It took a shock to his system to save Brantley’s life. The shock came courtesy of an automatic external defibrillator at Western High School, one of 11 the school maintains. Doctors have said CPR alone would not have saved him.

When Brantley collapsed at school, he was attended to immediately. Within minutes, an AED device was attached to his chest and delivered the shock that kept him going. More than once, the device saved him on the way to Howard Regional Health System, where he spent about an hour before being flown via LifeLine helicopter to Methodist in Indianapolis.

“In between the time when Drew collapsed and the time he got to the hospital, [the AED device] defibrillated him four different times,” said Methodist pediatric critical care nurse Tracy Davis. “It’s remarkable that he required that, but also very telling in that, had it not been available, the outcome would have been death. It would have been horrific.”

That message hit home over and over during Brantley’s stay at Methodist. Team after team of doctors and nurses made that clear.

“It’s just outstanding that Western had the forethought to be proactive enough to have an AED in their school,” Davis said. “Sometimes our focus is misplaced in terms of where we spend our money in athletics. Oftentimes we may focus on something like a bigger concession stand than when we need to. Typically, AEDs are around $1,500. That is not cheap, but I don’t think you can put a price on a life. You may never need to use one, but the one time you do, you can never put a price on that.”

She emphasized that this struck without warning. Brantley, who plays soccer and baseball at Western, had undergone heart screenings during physicals in the past. Yet they yielded nothing. Heart tests now show that one of his ventricles is weak for a person his age, but that may be due to what his heart went through.

The exact cause of Brantley’s condition isn’t known, but doctors think it may be genetic, so older sister Alaina will also be tested to see if she has similar issues.

“You never would have thought — here is a child, you look at him, you look at his size, stature, his athletic background, never in a million years would you think that child would have a cardiac arrest,” Davis said. “But he did. He needed help and had he not gotten it, he would not be with us today.”

Following the episode, Brantley’s prognosis is good. He’s off exercise for the time being, but his doctors hope he’ll eventually be cleared to play sports again. After enjoying a run to the regional final as the goalie for the soccer team, Brantley hopes to get back to the baseball diamond in time for the postseason this spring.

FRIDAY, FEB. 26

At the end of his first week back home, Brantley and his parents went to Tipton for Western’s boys basketball game. Last Tuesday, they took in the Panthers’ sectional game.

“It felt normal for the first time that this happened. I got to go out and see everybody I knew. It was incredible. Everybody asked me a million questions,” Brantley said. He knows he’ll get a lot of that in the coming days. “I’m not looking forward to that, but I guess it comes with the territory.”

The Brantleys’ gratitude is immense, for both those who attended to their son directly and for the people responsible for Western having AED devices.

They learned that the school has 11 units at hand in the school building and at the playing fields, but from talking to athletic director Rick Fields, they found out that just a few years ago that wasn’t the case. That made Ron and Angie worried for other students at other schools and got them moving on their mission to raise awareness about what saved their son.

“With the unit, the kid’s going to live a normal life. Without the unit, we lost our son,” Ron said, pausing to gather his emotions as the gravity of what might have happened weighed more heavily than it had a moment before. “We would have lost our son, at 17 years old. It’s a matter of the schools having the units.”

They hope more schools have them installed, and for Western to put them on busses to take to road games. Western Superintendent Peter O’Rourke agrees and wants them available for sports road trips and academic field trips.

“Find out if your school’s got the AED units. If they don’t, find out why. If they do, find out where they’re at,” Ron said. “Rick said that at Western four years ago, Western had one or two, and they were locked up in his cabinet, so unless he was nearby, they weren’t any good.”

Brantley is a little worse for wear after his episode. He’s 7 or 8 pounds lighter. He won’t be allowed to drive for another six months. He even missed school until returning Monday. His short-term memory is improving, but not what it was, due to oxygen deprivation from when his heart stopped beating. And his chest hurts from compressions performed after he collapsed and the first responders worked to save him.

Again, that’s an acceptable trade.

“Now that I remember [what happened], I don’t really want to talk about it, but I will,” Brantley said. “It hit me kind of hard when I had all the IVs and I was hooked up to a monitor all the time.

“We just want to make sure everybody knows what happened and they get the word out, the AEDs really can save people’s lives, and to have them everywhere is better than not to have them at all. It’s like a security blanket.

“Once you use them one time, it pays off.”