Watch as the final beam is lifted into place at the Behavioral Health & Wellness Center at Children's Nebraska in Omaha.
Bill and Kym Schammert were parked in the driveway of their Lincoln home on Jan. 5, 2021, about to take their 12-day-old son, Cameron, to the doctor.
They thought he had a bit of a bug, and their doctor had recommended that they bring him in. Cameron was buckled into his car seat in the back of their vehicle. They chatted a bit as they prepared to leave. Then Schammert looked back. His infant son was "LSU purple."
The couple pulled him out of his car seat and called 911. On the other end of the line was their "guardian angel," a dispatcher named Lisa Pachunka, who coached them through the steps to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.
Cameron spent the next 36 hours at Children's Nebraska, where doctors determined there had been no permanent damage to his heart or brain. He's now a happy, healthy 4-year-old.
But Schammert, now a reporter and anchor at KETV in Omaha, and his family continue to advocate for more people to learn CPR and use it when someone is in crisis.
Fortunately, he said, a great deal of attention has been focused on CPR in the two years since Damar Hamlin, a safety for the Buffalo Bills, underwent CPR and defibrillation on the field after going into cardiac arrest during a Monday Night Football game.
"My worry is, I don't want that to fade," said Schammert, who spoke at a CPR awareness media event Wednesday hosted by the American Heart Association - Nebraska. " ... Whether or not you are CPR trained or CPR certified, if you are ever put in that moment, by calling 911 and getting down on your knees and attempting CPR and being guided through it, you will do far more good than harm, as was the case with us."
Officials from the heart association, Children's Nebraska and the Omaha Fire Department also stressed the need for more people to take action in cardiac emergencies.
In Omaha, fewer than 47% of people currently start compressions when hands-only CPR is needed. While traditional CPR with breaths remains the gold standard, it's better to act -- by calling 911 and pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest -- than to wait. Nationally, more than 350,000 cardiac arrests occur outside of the hospital each year. Only 9% survive.
Chris Shives, executive director of the heart association in Nebraska, said the organization's goal is to double the survival rate for cardiac arrests suffered outside the hospital.
"We need more Nebraskans, more people in our communities, who know how to save a life," he said.
Schammert said he and his wife had learned the basics of infant CPR when she was pregnant with their older son, Theo.
But in an emergency, many people, including themselves, go blank. That's where help from a dispatcher can come in, as it did for them. As of Jan. 1, dispatchers in all 93 Nebraska counties must be trained to instruct callers to provide CPR over the phone.
Dr. Matthew Sorensen, a pediatric electrophysiologist with Children's Nebraska, said hands-only CPR is great. But survival rates from a cardiac arrest decrease by 10% a minute with CPR alone. That's where AEDs, which can electrically reset the heart, are needed.
He and Children's Nebraska have been involved with a national initiative called Project ADAM, or Automated Defibrillators in Adam's Memory. The program was inspired by the death of Adam Lemel, a 17-year-old high school student in Wisconsin who suffered a fatal sudden cardiac arrest in 1999 while playing basketball at school.
Nebraska, Sorensen said, is a step ahead. More than 200 schools across Nebraska now are designated Heart Safe through the program, meaning they have AEDs on hand as well as teams trained and prepared to use them -- and those teams practice regularly.
Since he arrived in Nebraska more than three years ago, he said, those schools have been able to save four lives -- three students and a staff member. Through philanthropic grants, the hospital has been able to place 85 AEDs at 64 sites -- and counting.
Two recent measures are intended to move the effort ahead. On Tuesday, State Sen. Beau Ballard of Lincoln introduced Legislative Bill 463, which would require Nebraska school districts to develop cardiac emergency response plans and provide for grants to help them reach that aim.
Nationally, the Bills' Hamlin backed the HEARTS Act, enacted last month, which provides grants to schools to support the purchase of automated external defibrillators, CPR and AED training and the development of cardiac emergency response plans.
Sorensen said 46 children's hospitals across the country also are working together to create a database to track long-term outcomes of children who suffer sudden cardiac arrest with the aim of standardizing treatment.
Dave Keber, a paramedic with the Omaha Fire Department, said the department about two years ago began looking more closely at the details of its responses and training to improve them.
But paramedics are more likely to be successful if someone has begun CPR before they arrive. So officials have been working with dispatchers, the heart association, Project ADAM, school groups and others to break through barriers and make sure community members are "getting hands on chest." With its partners, the department has been conducting demonstration and practice sessions at events such as the College World Series.
The department, Keber said, also is hoping to bring to Omaha a crowd-sourcing app that would alert people who are trained in CPR in case someone nearby needs it and pinpoint the location of the nearest AED. Lincoln already uses it.
But despite the less than stellar hands-on chest rate, he said, there are lots of success stories, like Cameron's. His photos showed cardiac arrest victims next to the brother, wife, neighbor and daughter who revived them using CPR.
To find a place to learn CPR, visit heart.org/cpr