It’s been more than a year since recent Revere graduate Caleb Perkins collapsed during a track practice, suffering from what he later discovered was cardiac arrest.
Revere athletic trainer Taylor Gray used an automated external defibrillator (AED) to shock his heart back into rhythm and CPR was performed by track coach Brian Racin to save his life before paramedics arrived on the scene to take over. Perkins, 18, has been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, or disease of the heart muscle.
In the time since the incident, he’s tattooed the event’s date — March 18, 2016 — onto his left arm in Roman numerals. He learned how to snowboard while working at Brandywine Ski Resort and he paced the sidelines at Minutemen football games this fall, unable to play per doctors’ precautions.
He’s also converted a nearly fatal event into fundraising efforts, guest speaking and, with the launch of the website http://ccf.convio.net/goto/calebperkins, a partnership with the Cleveland Clinic.
“I’ve gone pretty much nonstop since everything happened last year,” Perkins said. “I’ve been keeping pretty busy.”
The project is a fundraiser that first aims to collect $16,000 that will pay for eight AED devices. Those AEDs will be placed at Revere and Nordonia high schools, and the Perkins family hopes the project will eventually include other schools, churches and organizations.
The Cleveland Clinic has posted Perkins’ story, as partially told through the first-hand account of his mother, Lara, with a link directly to the Clinic’s philanthropy portal.
The collaboration is separate from, but follows up on, the work the Perkins family did on the Caleb Perkins Revived Fund, which they abbreviate as CPR. That self-created fundraising effort, kick-started by an event at Revere High School last May, has already gathered enough money to fund five more AEDs for the school.
“What we want to do is expand that to not only our school, but maybe to Suburban League schools, then Summit County schools,” the younger Perkins said. “Just making it bigger and bigger, and branch off and just see how far we can take it.”
In the meantime, Perkins has also served as a guest speaker with a program called mCORE based in Columbus. The Mobile Cardiac Overview and Risk Evaluation organization is meant to spread awareness about cardiac arrest and provides screenings to student-athletes across the nation.
“It kind of just started out as me going and telling my story and spreading awareness, and people starting going around and latching onto my story and asked me to take it farther,” Perkins said. “I guess people like my story and I enjoy telling it now.”
As for his personal health, Lara said her son has been in great condition since the cardiac arrest: He’s had all good follow-up visits and an implanted device’s battery should be operational for another 12 years.
“This has definitely been a year of ups and downs … It’s been a lot of doors opening for Caleb,” Lara Perkins said. “He’s one of my best friends, but I’m his mom first. There’s always going to be that part of me that worries even more so because he’s a heart patient.”
There’s plenty of irony in the situation, like how rap artist Drake — Caleb Perkins’ favorite — released his latest album on the first anniversary of Perkins’ cardiac arrest. The album is titled More Life.
But perhaps most coincidental is Perkins’ relationship with Dr. Terry Gordon, a retired cardiologist who spent much of his career pushing state and national legislature to get AEDs in Ohio schools. Gordon’s birthday is the same day Perkins was revived, and they both joke that they now share the same birthday.
“What better birthday gift than the [revival] of a child?” Gordon said.
Gordon’s advocacy began after he watched what he calls the “most sickening video he’s ever seen” in 2000. A cardiac arrest killed Joshua Miller, a sophomore linebacker at Barberton High School, during a football game against Ravenna. Gordon, then the president of the Summit County Ohio American Heart Association, responded with a campaign to place AEDs in local schools and eventually earned a $5 million state grant.
For this effort, which he said placed 447 AEDs in schools across the state, he won the American Heart Association’s National Physician of the Year award in 2002.
"He’s probably been my biggest advocate since I got out of the hospital, especially about spreading awareness,” Perkins said. “Him and I have been able to connect on some stuff that some people might not be able to understand. I think he understands the situation the most out of anybody.”
Gordon first heard secondhand about Perkins’ story while Lara Perkins simultaneously learned about Gordon’s previous work in the field. They touched base last spring, and the younger Perkins and Gordon have been close friends since.
“He realizes there are no mistakes, no accidents. If not for that little box that talked to somebody and told them what to do, Caleb wouldn’t be here,” Gordon said. “Having such a mission, he’s going to touch so many more lives than he even could’ve imagined.”
Lara Perkins said she’s proud of her son for his work, even as his schedule continues to get busier. He recently attended his senior prom and graduated from Revere.
Perkins is living the life of a normal teen, but he embraces what nearly killed him. He wears it on his arm proudly and speaks about it often. When he starts studying nursing at Kent State this fall, he’ll continue his work on all of the fundraisers, especially as the collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic progresses.
“He’s always had a huge heart to help others and he’s been kind and sweet, but I think this made him mature because he was forced to grow up,” Lara Perkins said of her son. “As far as working with these [fundraisers], the thing I love most is that I never have to make him go to any of these things as a parent or coerce him into it. He genuinely loves to do it, and that makes me very, very proud as a parent, to see him love to pay it forward to others.”