April 17, 2001
Brush with death
Victim and family vow to save others
By Carol Bogart
Lifestyle Editor
Shana Young, then 21, tried to convince herself she was just out of breath. Even though she'd had episodes of a racing heart, even blackouts, in the past -- they were fleeting. Shana dismissed them -- although, occasionally, she feared she was having a heart attack.
She says, "The attacks were so rare, they would only last like a minute or two. I would just would put it out of my mind. I wasn't listening to my body."
About a year ago, she experienced her most serious attack. "We had just run some sprints," Shana remembers. "Just a couple sprints, nothing very big at all. And my heart just started to beat out of control."
She continued to play and do the next drill. When the rapid heart rate didn't go away, Shana told her coach, "'I'm just gonna leave.' I start to walk away and it starts to get all black again. I remember I laid down outside the courts."
Shana tried to catch her breath. When she couldn't, she struggled to her feet and made it to the lobby of the Bay Winds tennis club in Sandusky. She realized she could barely stand up and asked someone to call an ambulance.
On the way to the hospital, she remembers thinking if she blacked out, she wouldn't wake up. She grasped the paramedic's hand and said, "If I black out, you have to bring me back. Don't let this happen to me."
At Firelands Hospital, she was asked if she was dieting excessively or using drugs. "No," and "no," were the answers. Not realizing Shana had a heart defect, the hospital initially treated her as though one or the other was her problem.
"They gave me a bunch of medicine," Shana says. "I learned afterwards it would have been better to just shock my heart back into the right rhythm."
Shana was lucky. Forty minutes after her attack began, her heart resumed a normal rhythm.
An electrocardiogram revealed her rapid heart rate was 250 beats a minute. Doctors told her family she should have died. That the odds were a million to one against survival.
Unknown to Shana and her family, her heart had an extra valve -- in her case a birth defect -- a condition called Wolff-Parkinson White syndrome.
Even though Shana's uncle is a cardiologist and her father a coach -- it had occurred to no one this very fit young woman might be suffering from the same condition that has dropped other star athletes in their physical prime -- high school football players, professional basketball stars and others.
The Youngs have made a mission of saving other young athletes from similar fates.
Shana's father, Bill Young, says he made a deal with God when Shana was undergoing the procedure to remove the extra valve. If Shana lived, Young vowed, he would fight to have schools, businesses and other public places stock Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs). Such equipment, he says, costs about the same as a single computer.
Young also believes schools should routinely require an electrocardiogram for any youngster planning to play sports. Such screening is required in both Italy and Japan, but not by the Ohio High School Athletic Association.
The Association has now agreed to require a cardiac prescreening questionnaire. Young says, "and that's a start."
Today, two procedures later, Shana's extra valve has been removed. To be closer to her Clyde family, she's transferred to Heidelberg College, where she has become the number one ranked singles tennis player in her conference. Her proud father says, "Shana is one of the top players in the OAC. We all feel very blessed and fortunate that she was able to resume her tennis career."
Shana's first procedure -- meant to remove the extra valve -- lasted 10 hours. It failed. A month later, her surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Andrea Natale, tried something new.
He told her worried parents, "I feel positive the next time we could do this but we have to go to the ethics committee. We have to do a different pathway which has only been done on two other people in the world. But the good news is, I did them both and they were both successful."
The second procedure lasted three hours and, Shana says, "They got it."
Today, it's as though she never had the extra valve. She can do everything she's always done and has resumed her very active lifestyle.
Shana says her close call has been a life-altering event. When she was going to college in Youngstown on a tennis scholarship, she put a lot of pressure on herself to win.
Heidelberg offers no athletic scholarships, she says. Now she plays because she enjoys the sport. "It's just fun," she says. "I play because I like playing."
Of her brush with death, Shana adds, "I think about it every day like, I'm lucky I'm still walking." Other athletes who have undetected heart conditions, "they don't know either, just like I didn't know," she says. "But they don't have a second chance.
"They just drop dead at practice one day.
"I feel so lucky. That could have easily been me."