St. Helena parishioner’s amazing story highlights ‘quiet threat’ of heart disease
By Bob Steiner
Editorial Assistant
Timing, they say, is everything.
That certainly seems true for what happened to Kathleen Burke on the cold, bright morning of Jan. 16, as a series of events fell rapidly into place to weave a life-saving web around her, just as her walk-and-run exercise in the park was carrying her to the brink of death.
Up to then, Burke, a parishioner of St. Helena Parish in Blue Bell and a nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, was enjoying a day off in observance of Martin Luther King Day.
She attended Mass, ran a brief errand and then decided at the last minute, on her way home, to brave the bitter cold weather for a walk in Wentz Run Park in Whitpain Township.
Normally, Burke went walking on Saturday or Sunday with her friend, Micki Burns, but family responsibilities had prevented the two from getting together that weekend. So Burke called Burns to invite her along that Monday, but Burns, who was in the middle of an already busy day, declined the invitation.
“She hadn’t planned on going,” Burke said. “We hadn’t made a time to run that day. She had errands [to run]. … It was just a last minute thought on my part. It was a beautiful day — it was cold, but it was beautiful.”
Then, as Burke began her walk, Burns decided she could squeeze in a little exercise after all, and went to meet Burke at the park.
“I walked a little bit by myself, then Micki came. And I felt fine,” Burke said. “ I guess I walked maybe four miles, then we ran the last quarter-mile.
“So I remember, we started running — we ran all the way around the basketball court,” Burke said, “and the last thing I remember was Micki being in front of me, and me saying to myself, ‘Boy, I really need to catch up. I’m so tired today, I really need to get in better shape.’ And that’s all I remember.”
At exactly that moment, Burke went into cardiac arrest and collapsed on the ground.
“I didn’t have any pain,” she said. “I didn’t have any sensation that this was going to happen.”
She has no recollection of what happened next.
Burns saw her friend lying unconscious and began screaming for help.
On such a frigid day — temperatures hovered around the mid 20’s — the park was not filled with the usual hustle and bustle of kite flyers, dog walkers and picnickers that one would find on a warm, summer day. Burns’ cries seemed to be in vain.
But someone else who would not normally be at the park that morning had also decided to join a friend.
Karen Rafferty, a nurse at Mercy Suburban Hospital in Norristown, had reluctantly agreed to meet her friend Cindy Stittle, who had suggested they give their children some playtime at the park on the holiday.
“It was freezing,”Rafferty recalled. “It was like a 25-degree day. I have young kids, and trying to get them to go to the park that day was hard, [but] my friend Cindy requested that I go to the park that day. We were on our way home from the store and [decided], ‘Let’s just go.’”
At the time, a life-or-death rescue operation was certainly not on Rafferty’s agenda.
But when she heard Burns, and saw Burke on the ground, Rafferty sprang into action.
“I went to Kathleen ... and she was face-down on the ground. My immediate reaction was, ‘Please be breathing.’ And when I realized she wasn’t, instincts just took over,” Rafferty said.
While Rafferty was performing CPR on Burke, Burns called 911.
Responding to the call, the emergency dispatcher sent township police officers to the scene.
They didn’t have far to travel: “The police were driving into the park when the call was being made,” Rafferty said. “They were within seconds of the initial dispatch call to be at the park.…
“I did about three rounds of CPR prior to their arrival — less than two-and-a-half minutes probably,” she said. “The police brought up the AED [automated external defibrillator] machine, and together we put the AED machine on [Burke].”
The AED machine assists in resuscitating a cardiac arrest victim,” Rafferty said: “It evaluates the patient and then tells you what to do — either to do CPR or to get away from the patient” so that the machine can administer an electric shock to re-start the patient’s heart.
“It did shock her, ” Rafferty said.
Burke said she believes such machines are critical to life-saving efforts and should be standard equipment in gyms, schools, and physical therapy centers — but the fact the officers realized they should bring the AED machine to the park amazes her.
“All they knew [was] a woman came running down and said somebody fell,” Burke said. “They didn’t know that I had a cardiac arrest. But they ran and brought the AED anyway. If they didn’t, and had to go back and get it, that would’ve been another minute or so.”
And every minute is vital in treating cardiac arrest. AED machines must be used within the first few minutes of cardiac arrest to be most effective.
After the shock, the AED machine indicated that another round of CPR for Burke was necessary, and Rafferty’s hope for Burke’s survival was dwindling with every second.
“At that point, one of the officers — Sergeant Ken Lawson from Whitpain Township — took over,” Rafferty said. “He was doing CPR — and he, all of a sudden, realized she was looking at him.
“A tear rolled down her cheek,” Rafferty said, “and he knew at that point she was going to live.”
In the hospital, doctors found a blockage in one of Burke’s coronary arteries. She underwent angioplasty and had a stent inserted in the artery later that day. Because Rafferty had immediately initiated CPR after Burke’s collapse —keeping oxygen flowing in her bloodstream —Burke sustained no damage to her brain or any other organ.
“I do really believe we were all called there,” Rafferty said. “Anybody who knows me would know that for me to go to a park on a day when it’s 20-something degrees with my children is unheard of. So we were definitely called to go to the park.”
The remarkable series of events has left Burke astonished.
“We were supposed to have a heater put in that day,” Burke said, “That got canceled. I was supposed to go for a mammogram, that got canceled. So I ended up having this day [off] at that park, at that time.”
She said her children — Katie, 17, and John, 20 — have a theory as to who may have been responsible for all the ‘coincidences:’ Her husband of 27 years, John Burke III, who died in September 2005 from gastric cancer.
“My children believe he saved me by making all these people arrive at the same time,” she said. “[They] attribute it to my husband. He did all this.”
It’s clear to her that her husband picked the right people for the job.
“I feel like all these people are heroes. Everybody,” Burke said.
“There were many people involved. … I think my children are heroes in this, too. They just lost their father, and almost lost their mother, yet, at the hospital they had to sign all the permission slips and make all the phone calls. They had to become adults very quickly.”
Burke said she hopes that, if nothing else, people will take from her near-tragic experience a lesson about the often quiet threat of heart disease, which is the number-one killer of women in the United States.
“I was a healthy 50-year-old with low cholesterol, low blood-pressure, low heart rate,” Burke said. “I run and I exercise, so [I’m] not the typical candidate for heart disease.
“And I was being treated for [acid] reflux,” she said. “I was having pain prior to this — and here, my ‘indigestion’ wasn’t indigestion after all.”
As soon as she was fully recovered, Burke tracked down Rafferty’s number in a St. Helena School phone list. But what, exactly, do you say to someone who saved your life just days earlier?
“That was a weird telephone call,” Burke said jokingly. “I left a message saying, ‘This is Kathy Burke, the person whose life you saved. I was just calling to say thank you, but ‘thank you’ just doesn’t quite cut it. But — call me back when you get a chance.’”
Burke and Rafferty have spoken several times since then, and Burke is still trying to figure out how to say ‘thank you.’
“She sent me the most beautiful bouquet of flowers,” Rafferty said. “[But] the best gift she could’ve given me was just to talk to me and let me know that she was okay.”
The two new friends even returned to Wentz Run Park together not long after the harrowing ordeal. The reunion was particularly poignant for Burke.
“It was so emotional, because I looked like I wasn’t going to make it,” Burke said. “I have no recollection of the entire event. None whatsoever. It’s still hard for me to realize that this really happened.
“[But] I felt like it happened for a reason,” she added, “yet to be determined.”
Which it will be. All in good time.
Bob Steiner is the CS&T’s Editorial and Sports Assistant. E-mail him at rsteiner@adphila.org or call 215-587-3698.