A Slippery Rock University student says he owes his life to his fellow classmates.
Frantzi Schaub is a junior theatre major and was in an acting class in late March when his heart stopped.
He says he doesn’t remember much about what happened after that but his fellow classmates and teacher sure do. Samantha Dyer, a sophomore, said initially they believed Schaub was just being extra dramatic during the exercise, but they soon realized he wasn’t playing around.
“Frantzi runs down the aisle and just collapses,” Dyer, a sophomore dual major in biology and theatre, said. “And he’s extremely dramatic as it is, so we all thought he was just doing his thing. I peeked around the corner and saw that his hand was all cramped up, which meant oxygen wasn’t reaching his brain. I ran to him and saw that he wasn’t waking up.”
Another student in the class, Samantha Balaj, a junior exercise science major from Akron, Ohio, was trained in first aid and CPR. She called University Police from her cell phone, telling the dispatcher: “There’s an unconscious student in Maltby, we need help.”
“(Balaj) threw her phone at me so she could start CPR on him,” Dyer said. “At first we were thinking seizure, so we rolled him onto his side and we realized he didn’t have a pulse. So we rolled him back and she started CPR while I talked to the police officers and updated them on everything that was going on.”
First responders arrived quickly with an AED to shock his heart back to life.
Schaub was diagnosed with a heart condition known as HCM, or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and would have heart surgery a few days later. He returned to class in one week.
HCM, a common cause of sudden cardiac arrest in young people, occurs when heart muscle cells enlarge and cause the walls of the ventricles to thicken. Schaub, who had no previous known heart problems, had surgery two days later and was discharged a day after surgery. He returned to class the following Monday, six days after the incident.
Several students and Skeele, who arranged a phone chain for updates following the incident, visited Schaub, who also credits his friend, Erica Robbins, for helping him during his recovery. Although there is no “cure” for Schaub’s condition, he is expected to fully recover and live a normal life with his implanted defibrillator.
Schaub is a resident of Slippery Rock. He was born in Haiti and raised in Beaver Falls.
