94-Year-Old Airplane Passenger Saved from Heart Failure

Sept. 18--When a 94-year-old airplane passenger began to shudder with a deadly heart episode in the sky over Milwaukee, two Henry Ford Cardiac Rehabilitation workers on board sprang into action.

Sheryl Sebastian, 51, and Matthew Saval, 42, saved the life of Sam Aliotta. On Wednesday, he got to thank them, tearfully, and hear a retelling of the Sept. 6 incident he barely remembers.

They were flying Sept. 6 back to Detroit from Denver, where Aliotta had been to a wedding and the two exercise physiologists had been at a heart-health conference. While napping on the flight, Aliotta began to shudder.

"I happened to be in an aisle seat," said Sebastian, a CPR instructor of 25 years from Clarkston. "I looked over and Matt, my colleague, was in the aisle, and all I see are somebody's feet. He looked at me, and he said, 'There's no pulse, and I'm starting CPR.'"

She retrieved the Delta airplane's Automatic External Defibrillator, a portable device that provides a shock to the heart to stop life-threatening arrhythmia, from the flight crew. The AED worked, shocking Aliotta, whom Saval and Sebastian monitored on the remaining hour of the flight into Detroit.

She describes the experience as "surreal." After Aliotta was escorted off the plane, she went back to check on Saval.

"Then we hugged, and the whole plane broke out in applause," she said.

Aliotta's daughter-in-law, Barbara Aliotta, 71, of Harrison Township had been the first to notice something was wrong. Seated next to him, she'd noticed him shuddering, "almost like he was really cold."

She asked him if he was cold, and he didn't respond. Soon she started yelling, "Pop, Pop... Help!"

"That must have scared people to death," Barbara said of the airplane's passengers.

Dr. Chandrakant Pujara, who treated Sam at Oakwood Annapolis Hospital, said heart fibrillation had put the senior citizen at risk of sudden cardiac death.

"This is a very significant cardiac event, which can lead to death," he said, adding that 350,000 people die of it per year.

Another doctor installed stents to help with clogging in the area of Sam's heart. And on Wednesday, he was walking and talking, trying to remember what happened on that flight.

"I know I was on an airplane," Sam said. "I saw people looking down on me, and I was wondering what the hell was going on. That's all."

Saval explained: "You were pretty disoriented at the time, but you woke up."

Sebastian and Saval, of Novi, had been at the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation's national conference. Sebastian is also certified in Advanced Cardiac Life Support. She said there was also a doctor of internal medicine on the plane, and they discussed whether the plane should land early but decided Aliotta could make it to Detroit.

Saval, who is also a research manager in Henry Ford Hospital's Preventive Cardiology department and certified in ACLS, said they were grateful for the opportunity to save Aliotta.

Sam and Barbara had been flying with his son, Larry Aliotta, 71, of Harrison Township. Barbara said Sam had seemed normal on the trip, which included a visit to a wedding in Breckenridge, where the elevation is more than 9,000 feet above sea level.

For Sebastian, along with the uncanny timing of their presence on a plane where a man suffered a heart attack at 37,000 feet is her memory of how it unfolded. She was reading "The Shack," a Christian novel by William P. Young about a man who meets God, on her iPad.

"Honest to God, cross my heart, I got to this point where this man goes back to the shack and meets God in the presence of another man and, I think, two women," she said. "And at that point, it came over the speaker, 'Is there a doctor on the plane?'"

Sebastian and Saval encourage everyone to learn CPR.

"This is what Matt and I are trained to do, but CPR is just so simple," Sebastian said.

Contact Robert Allen at rallen@freepress.com or @rallenMI

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