The grief of losing a child to unexpected cardiac arrest is well-known to Harvetta Jackson. Both of her children were gone.
Jackson added, glancing at a photo of her son,”This is what he loved to do. That’s all he talked about was playing basketball for the NBA, and he just loved sports and he was great at it.”
Phillip Jackson was an excellent football and basketball player at Sandalwood High School in Jacksonville. As a sports player, he got a sports checkup every year.
“They never detected a thing,” Jackson said.
One of the saddest days of her life occurred on what was meant to be a celebratory day. December 21, 2009 was her son’s 18th birthday.
“That was supposed to be the day of his life, you know, turning an adult, a young man, and we turned around and he was gone,” Jackson recalled.
She claims there were no signals beforehand. Her son seemed fine when he began playing the game. Big Phil, as his friends nicknamed him, was leaving the locker room in the middle of a basketball game when he suddenly fell.
“He fell into one of his players. And then he’s such a jokester, they thought he was just playing,” Jackson stated.
She was at the game with Phillips’ 16-month-old son. Suddenly, one of the players rushed out, saying, ‘Miss Jackson, Miss Jackson, Phillip collapsed. Phillip collapsed.’ I went in, and he was on the floor, breathing shallowly. Her son had a sudden cardiac arrest.
“No one did CPR, no AED machine, nothing,” Jackson said.
Philip passed away in the hospital.
“They called it cardiac conduction system, where the heart misfires. And if no one does anything, we don’t have AED machines there, or anything like that, CPR, they don’t make it. And unfortunately, my son was one of those children,” Jackson said.
Sudden cardiac arrest is a serious situation where a person’s heart suddenly stops beating. This often happens due to a problem with the heart’s electrical system.
“Really any child could potentially be at risk. But we know that competitive athletes are about three times the risk of their age match peers when we look at the scientific studies,” Dr. Jonathan Drezner said. “But still, any child, any adolescent, any young adult, could be at risk for sudden cardiac arrest.”
Dr. Drezner, who leads the Center for Sports Cardiology at the University of Washington, mentions that around one in 300 young people has a heart condition that might result in sudden cardiac arrest.
These conditions can usually be spotted through a test called an electrocardiogram, often referred to as an EKG or ECG. Phillip, however, never underwent this test.
Latoya, her 29-year-old daughter, also passed away in 2016.
“They were born eight years apart, and I lost them eight years apart. She had a bad asthma attack. And then she went into cardiac arrest and passed away as well,” she said.
She wants every family to understand that anyone might have abrupt cardiac arrest at any time.
“You never know when it’s going to happen. And it needs to be prevented. I mean they can collapse singing, dancing, walking, anything,” Jackson said. “We need to get these tests done so our children can live. I just want to make sure that no one else’s child passes away when we can do something about it.”
