After teen’s heart stops, Newport Beach mom pushes for cardiac screening

It was a Saturday, a day that Heather Besen expected would unfold like any other.

Until she heard a strange moan coming from her son’s room upstairs.

Safvet, a junior at Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach, had just returned home from playing soccer. The 16-year-old was making a name for himself on the club team he played for in Irvine, the Pateadores.

Last year, he’d led the team in goals and assists. College scouts were taking note.

So on Feb. 7, Besen wasn’t sure what to make of the noise upstairs. Then she heard a crash. She called to her son, the youngest of four, by his nickname: “Safi? Safi, are you OK?”

When she reached his room, she found him crumpled near his desk, gasping for air.

A former nurse, Besen, 49, made sure his airway was clear and listened to his chest. His heart gave off a strange rattling noise.

“I could hear something, but it wasn’t like a bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump,” she said.

Then his heart stopped. He wasn’t breathing.

Call the paramedics, she shouted to her ex-husband, who they are living with temporarily. She performed CPR. Paramedics arrived about four minutes later. Safvet’s heart hadn’t restarted.

Paramedics wheeled the teen on a stretcher into the frontyard. They administered CPR and epinephrine and used electric paddles.

“I just kept thinking this is too long,” Besen recalled. “I just kept praying, please with everything in my heart, please just save my baby.”

Finally, Safvet’s heart thumped back to life. Besen, who had been watching the clock, knew that more than an hour had passed with only the efforts of the paramedics keeping the boy’s blood pumping. As he was rushed to Hoag Hospital, Besen prayed.

Before that day, Safvet had no history of serious illness, just asthma, Besen said in a series of phone interviews this week. He was fit and worked out regularly at the gym. The blue-eyed blond came by his unusual name thanks to an uncle in Turkey for whom he was named. The teen would often take naps, but his mother figured he was like most high schoolers in that.

At the hospital, seizures buffeted Safvet’s body. Doctors administered sedation and anti-seizure medications, but an EEG showed the seizures weren’t relenting. The teen was hooked up to a respirator. Finally, Besen heard a glimmer of good news: A CAT scan showed no bleeding and no spongy appearance in brain tissue that can indicate brain death.

Doctors decided to put Safvet’s body in a state of icy hibernation to prevent organ damage. A normal body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius, but Safvet’s body, surrounded by cooling packs, dropped to 32 degrees Celsius.

After 18 hours, Besen said, they slowly returned his body to normal temperature. Gradually, the teen was weaned off of sedatives. His eyes remained closed. Days passed. Friends rallied behind him on social media with the hashtag #prayforsafvet.

“Each day, the neurologist told us he didn’t see any signs of improvement. No gag reflex, no foot reflex,” Besen said. “He wasn’t reacting.”

Finally, a breakthrough came around 1 a.m. Feb. 12, five days after the teen had entered the hospital.

Besen said she could see that the respirator tube made him agitated. She told him to calm down. Suddenly, his left eye opened.

“I started crying,” she said. “I’m like, ‘My baby’s there.’”

In the days that followed, the family did everything it could to encourage Safvet to respond. They talked to him around the clock. His sister Scarlett dropped a soccer ball on the bed, daring him to kick it.

On the day his breathing tube was removed, Safvet gave the family a thumbs-up. He squeezed his mother’s hand over and over. He’d give her hand two squeezes, and then two more.

Two squeezes is the family signal for “I love you.”

In time, doctors discovered Safvet has a heart arrhythmia called long QT syndrome. They said his heart is working at only 40% of its capacity, a condition that he may have had for years. The condition is genetic, so his three siblings will undergo testing to see if they have it.

Safvet’s overall recovery could take up to two years, Besen said. On Wednesday, doctors implanted a defibrillator to kick-start his heart if it stops again. The surgery went well, but Besen isn’t sure when her son might be able to go home.

“Everyone keeps saying to him, ‘You’re a miracle child. You’re here to do something,’” Besen said.

She said she wants people to know that miracles do happen. Her son, she said, is a fighter.

Besen said Safvet’s memory is stuck on that Saturday. He remembers playing soccer. He remembers going to his room.

“He’s foggy,” she said.

This week, he told her he remembered watching the Super Bowl, but she said he still struggles with his short-term memory. Doctors have told her it will take at least three to six months for his brain to recover.

Meantime, the medical bills are mounting. Besen is on disability. Because of a medical condition, she has lost functioning in her legs, and the condition is spreading to other parts of her body. Insurance, she said, doesn’t cover the cost of the defibrillator, or the physical therapy or the rehabilitation that Safvet needs.

Last week, family friends started a GoFundMe campaign online to raise $5 million. So far, they’ve raised $5,000.

Many said they were touched by Safvet’s story. Some left remarks like this one, “We don’t know each other. But I have teens, and my heart breaks for your story. Wishing you a full and speedy recovery.”

Besen wants to make sure this doesn’t happen to another family. She’d like schools to require cardiac screening, such as an EKG, before students can play sports.

This test isn’t required now, but guidelines released by the National Athletic Trainers’ Assn. in 2014 recommend that student athletes undergo heart screening before they play competitive sports.

Last year, an Anaheim high school athlete died after suffering cardiac arrest while warming up to play tennis.

Besen knows cardiac tests aren’t cheap. But she noted that schools spend money on new fields and facilities, so why not on student health?

Besen is considering starting a campaign on change.org and taking the issue to the school board and local lawmakers.

I’m going to shake every tree I can,” she said. “Now I want everybody checked.”

If her son had been tested, she said, “none of this would have happened.”