Celebrations: Petaluma teens keep mom alive with CPR

Tena Jackson has no memory of the morning she died. The Petaluma educator only knows her two teenage daughters helped bring her back to life, despite their panic and fear.

Jackson, 52, suffered cardiac arrhythmia in April 2015, collapsing in her living room from sudden cardiac arrest. She was face down on the floor, initially with a sporadic pulse.

Her daughters, Emmy and Koko Stephens-Jackson, then 13 and 16, worked together, Emmy on the phone with a 911 operator and Koko performing CPR from her instructions.

“If I hadn’t had CPR, I’d be dead, no question,” said Jackson, a single mother. “Just the movement of blood to the brain is critical.”

The girls were in bed when their mom got up to start her day before heading to work as a special education instructional assistant at San Antonio High School in Petaluma. She made tea, “liked” a post on Facebook and paid a bill online, they later discovered while piecing together Jackson’s morning.

Without warning and with no cardiac history, her heartbeat suddenly changed pace. The girls, asleep nearby in their shared bedroom, didn’t hear her fall. Their older brother, Conor, now 20, also was asleep in his room farther away in the residence, with no idea his mother had collapsed.

The family’s frightened cat, an ample-sized orange tabby named Rachy, paced in the hallway making “weird meowing” sounds, “kind of like a growling meow,” Emmy said. She was awakened around 7 a.m. by the crying and went to see what was upsetting their pet.

Still half-asleep, Emmy called out to her sister after finding their mother’s lifeless body. Koko began screaming, panicked by Jackson’s icy skin, violet eyes and what Koko believed was her mother’s “death rattle.”

Emmy remembers vividly: “Her lips were turning blue, and her eyes were kind of opened and had turned kind of foggy.”

Initially, Koko wondered if Jackson had choked on something. She first turned her mother’s body and attempted to perform the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge whatever she reasoned was blocking Jackson’s airway. Emmy, by then speaking with the 911 operator, directed her sister to perform CPR.

Luckily - perhaps miraculously - Emmy and her seventh-grade classmates at Petaluma Junior High School had trained in hands-only CPR just a few weeks earlier. The countywide Save Lives Sonoma initiative, sponsored in Petaluma by the local fire department and the Petaluma Health Care District, included a video, demonstrations and practice sessions with dummies.

The training was significant enough that Emmy noticed her sister’s hands weren’t positioned properly as she tried to revive their mother. She corrected Koko, who had no CPR training.

“The moment I reached her, I slapped her multiple times and begged her to stay with us,” Koko wrote in an email from Tacoma, Washington, where she’s a freshman majoring in psychology at Pacific Lutheran University.

“There was no option of flight; I had to fight to keep her alive. I don’t know how someone could see someone they love in the fight for life and refuse to act.”

The sisters, always good friends, somehow managed to stay calm enough to follow the 911 operator’s instructions. Medical personnel later used paddles to shock Jackson’s heart and restore its rhythm; the girls are credited with saving their mother’s life and preventing any brain damage or memory loss.

Why Jackson experienced cardiac arrhythmia remains a mystery.

“There’s no reason they can find,” she said. “That’s why this is so scary for people. It’s such a fluke thing.”

Her daughters were presented with Golden Heart Awards through Petaluma’s HeartSafe Community initiative, Sonoma County’s first city to meet HeartSafe’s criteria.

Emmy, a 14-year-old freshman at Petaluma High School and a member of the North Bay Rowing Club, can only shrug when asked how she and her sister maintained enough composure to save their mother.

Jackson, immensely proud of her children, answers: “They’re pretty clear-headed. These girls were watching their mom die.”

The ordeal had a profound impact on Koko, 18, who still can’t listen to anyone count aloud. It reminds her of counting CPR compressions, over and over. She said she also is far more aware of the fragility of life, the value in saying “I love you,” and the need to step up in challenging circumstances.

The emergency shaped her career path, too. Having experienced trauma, she now hopes to become a children’s therapist or a psychiatric nurse working with children.

The family is grateful for the fast actions of first responders and the calm demeanor of the 911 operator. “I actually spoke really fast, and the 911 operator said, ‘OK, slow down,’?” Emmy said.

The call was heart-wrenching enough to later bring at least two first responders to tears, Jackson said. During the award ceremony, the family was reunited with the fire and police personnel who aided them, as well as the 911 operator.

Saying “thank you,” Jackson said, barely covers the family’s gratitude. She now celebrates two birthdays.

She was hospitalized for eight days following her cardiac arrest, but soon returned to work and her daily routine. She is now in good health but has a cardiac defibrillator in her chest to monitor her heart.

Tragically, her ex-husband and her children’s father died unexpectedly just 10 months after her sudden cardiac arrest.

“I think how disgustingly unfair it could have been” for the children to have lost both parents, she said.

The former Peace Corps volunteer didn’t have any compelling experience she can recall from her brief death - “no lights, nothing on the other side,” she said, “but that doesn’t take away from what (the girls) did.”

For more information about Save Lives Sonoma and CPR trainings, visit savelivessonoma.com.