Oceanside CA— Celine Showman of Oceanside will join thirteen Heart Heroes who will ride on their float Keep the Beat Alive in the 2017 Rose Parade® presented by Honda. The premier float features youths who saved lives by administering CPR, as well as the people they saved, and honors the passage of a new California law that will provide CPR training to thousands of high school students each year.
Celine Showman doesn’t remember much of December 2007. For most of the month, she was in a medically induced coma so her heart could recover from a cardiac arrest.
A 33-year-old working mom, who was also the PTA president and a Brownie troop co-leader, Celine was perpetually busy. When she developed a bad cold that fall and the doctor suggested she take time off to rest, “I remembered rolling my eyes and thinking I don’t have time for that,” she said. Her cough continued for months and unbeknownst to her, the virus spread to her heart.
One December night she took her then-eight-year-old daughter Megan out to dinner and a movie. They were sitting in a sushi restaurant. “All I remember was looking at my phone,” Celine explained, “then, according to my daughter, who had to tell me because I can’t remember anything from that night – I fell off my barstool.”
Part of her chain of survival, Megan called for help and a crowd soon gathered and began dialing 911, but no one did anything for a few minutes.
Then like “superheroes” three Navy Corpsmen from Camp Pendleton appeared, pushing over tables to get to Celine who had begun turning blue. One took Megan away and helped her call her dad. The others got to work with life-saving CPR.
The woman and two men had just returned from a deployment in Iraq and were celebrating. Familiar with intense situations, they sprung to action and saved Celine’s life with basic CPR until the paramedics arrived.
“I was super lucky they knew CPR,” said Celine. “When they got to me, I did not have a pulse and I wasn’t breathing. If they hadn’t been there and done CPR, I would not have lived.”
Celine now has an ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) to ensure that if she has a cardiac arrest again, her heart will be shocked back to a normal rhythm.
“Every second counts in a situation like this. Because of these three Corpsmen, I get to see my daughter graduate high school. It’s truly a blessing. Everyone should know CPR.”
The people who will ride with Celine on the Union Bank and American Heart Association’s Keep the Beat Alive Float, come from three different Western states and range in age from 11 to 75 years. They will stand on the float’s 55-foot long floral piano keyboard and among its four eight-foot tall floral drums and a nine-foot heart-shaped DJ booth. The musical elements represent the beat of the heart and the correct compression rate for CPR administration — a rhythm of 100 beats per minute.