Zach Kaderka is feeling a little special these days.
Mostly because of what his mother told him.
“She said I’m her hero,” the 8-year-old Windsor boy said Monday.
When Jennifer Kaderka collapsed Oct. 9 from a usually fatal heart defect, Zack calmly called 911, then followed the dispatcher’s instructions and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on his unconscious mother until paramedics arrived.
“She was flatlined when they got here,” said Zack’s father, Darrin Kaderka. “She had no heartbeat and no respiration. They had to defibrillate her heart three times at the house and once on the way” to the hospital.
Jennifer Kaderka has been diagnosed with Prolonged QT Syndrome, which causes the heart to lose its rhythm and is usually fatal, her husband said. She is recovering, after receiving a pacemaker and a defibrillator of her own, and apparently escaped the brain damage suffered by many who survive such attacks, he said.
Darrin Kaderka was in Dallas when the incident happened.
He said his wife was home with Zack and their two younger children.
She was on the telephone talking with a woman she works with. The kids were being noisy in the background, the woman later told him, and Jennifer said, “Zack is being disrespectful.”
Then there was no sound, and the woman thought the mother had gone to discipline Zack.
Meanwhile, Zack heard a crash in the bedroom and found his mother unconscious.
“I was thinking my mom was pretty much a goner,” Zack said. But he called 911 as he had been taught at school and at home.
“He gave me his address and was very calm,” remembers Mike Arnsdorf, a dispatcher with the Weld County Communications Center. “He was a very good RP (reporting party), especially since he was 8 years old.”
After Zack described the situation, Arnsdorf told him how to perform mouth-to- mouth resuscitation.
“He was very calm. It was weird how calm he was,” he said.
The paramedics arrived quickly and took over the lifesaving process, Arnsdorf said.
Darrin Kaderka said Zack remembers the mouth-to-mouth part of his heroics as being “kinda gross.” But he and his wife know how lucky they are.
“Oh, my. I’ll tell you, God has a plan for her life,” Darrin Kaderka said of his wife.
“I think he was awesome, totally remarkable,” he said of his son. “He performed way beyond what I would have expected him to do. We often underestimate what children can do.”
Staff writer Jim Kirksey can be reached at 303-820-1448 or jkirksey@denverpost.com.
