Local schools prepare to fight heart attacks with a charge of electricity.
AUBURN – A lunch box-sized version of a defibrillator, the familiar electric device used to jump-start a heart, is headed to St. Dominic Regional High School.
The school is the latest in a growing number of area facilities to get the life-saving gadget.
Lewiston High School has three of them, Edward Little High School has two and the Auburn Mall has two.
Rescuers want the devices to be available “wherever there’s a mass gathering of people,” said Lee Hixon, St. Dominic’s dean of students. Hixon and five other faculty members at the Auburn school were recently certified to use the device, which has pads instead of the paddles that TV watchers know.
Encased in hard plastic with a handle, the automatic external defibrillator opens up and operates with audio cues, talking to the person who uses it.
“It’s really easy,” said Hixon. “It talks you through the whole thing.”
Teens playing sports, teachers, staff and visitors might all benefit from the device, said Brenda Roney, spokeswoman for the Maine chapter of the American Heart Association.
“It’s true that the danger of students needing it is slim, but lots of other people could be helped,” Roney said.
The device is being awarded to St. Dominic’s on behalf of Ray Gamache, a Sabattus man who raised $5,623 last year in the Lewiston-Auburn American Heart Walk.
As the local fund-raiser’s top money-maker, Gamache was given the right to choose where a donated defibrillator would go. After learning that his hometown already had one, he decided on St. Dominic’s, his alma mater.
The device costs about $1,200, said Roney.
The school accepted and fulfilled the heart association’s condition that people at the school would become trained in its use and would maintain it. Batteries and other components need checking. Hixon was named the site leader. He hopes the device will never be used, he said. Yet, he said, he’s ready to use it if he must.
“If you don’t have a defibrillator, your chances of surviving a heart attack go down drastically,” said Roney.
For every minute of delay, the rate of surviving a heart attack drops about 10 percent, Roney said.
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