Watching Cameron Knowles chase after the family cat and noisily play video games with little brother Zachary, it’s hard to imagine that just a month ago the whirlwind 7-year-old lay dead on his bedroom floor for at least 12 minutes.

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 to 1296 Weiland Road 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.”

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.”

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Source: democrat and chronicle