‘I TAKE NOTHING FOR GRANTED NOW’ ADVANCED CARDIAC TREATMENT LEAVES A TEACHER WITH A GRATEFUL HEART.
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wo-and-a-half years ago, Dana Zika was a busy, healthy 41-yearold with a young son, a full-time job as a kindergarten teacher and a parttime job as a hostess at the Kenilworth Diner. Then, as she was finishing her shift at the diner one night, her heart stopped. “It was the day after Thanksgiving, 2019, and I hadn’t been scheduled to work that night; I was filling in for a coworker,” she recalls. “I wasn’t feeling great. I started to sweat for no reason. I just wanted to finish cleaning up and go home. I sat down on a bench to chat
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with my boyfriend, who had come in after work for dinner, and a coworker. That’s the last thing I remember.” As she was sitting at the table, she suddenly slid from the bench to the ground, where she lay without moving. Her boyfriend and coworkers soon realized that she wasn’t breathing and frantically called 911. A series of very fortunate coincidences combined to save Zika’s life. “I really think everything aligned that night,” she says. “I wasn’t alone at home, but in a public place. My boyfriend was
there to start CPR; he was the only one in the diner who knew how to do it. Also, the ambulance happened to be very close by and was at the diner in minutes. And the police officer who arrived to use the AED [automated external defibrillator] machine was the one who trains other officers in its use. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
A RARE DISORDER
By the time Zika arrived at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center (NBI), the defibrillator had shocked her heart into
Spring 2022
3/4/22 1:09 PM
