He was the closest.
“I wanted to believe that it was just a little girl who fell down and might need a little bit of help,” Connelly said, bracing himself for what was to come. “Quickly, I realized that it was a little bit more than that.”
Arriving on scene, he approached Tiannah, checking her pulse and breathing.
“She took one deep gasp in and then that was it,” he said.
He started doing chest compressions — his first time ever doing them on a child — then switched to the defibrillator when a teacher brought it out. Tiannah still didn’t have a pulse. He returned to chest compressions.
“It was scary, to be entirely honest,” said Connelly, who has a six-year-old son and five-year-old daughter.
Minutes later, firefighters arrived. They took over and Tiannah finally started breathing. Paramedics rushed her to Juravinski Hospital.
The school was still trying to reach her mom.
Rose Antone had been busy at work that day, missing phone calls. It wasn’t until her receptionist interrupted, telling her something happened and her daughter was in the hospital, that she raced to Juravinski.
“She was hooked up to all these machines,” Antone said, through tears, recalling her reunion with the second youngest of her four children. “All I could think of was that I’m going to lose my baby.”
A nurse assured Antone they were doing everything they could to save her. Then Tiannah was taken to McMaster Children’s Hospital and placed in the ICU.
Days passed as doctors performed tests on Tiannah. They learned she had a heart condition called restrictive cardiomyopathy — an issue with the heart’s structure. She had the condition since birth. When under stress, sparked sometimes by exercise, the condition can throw off the heart’s rhythm, which can cause cardiac arrest.
Antone says Tiannah was a healthy child, but had been complaining recently about feeling tired and sore.
Tiannah was transferred to Sick Kids Hospital where, on Oct. 18, she underwent minimally invasive surgery and had a defibrillator implanted into her chest. She may need a heart transplant in the future, but if she has a cardiac arrest again before that, the defibrillator is meant to kick in to save her. She was released from hospital on Sunday.
On Thursday, Antone held Tiannah, who was wearing a flower-patterned top and pants and a hospital bracelet, on her lap on the couch. Connelly sat next to them. He jokingly urged them not to cry.
Antone couldn’t help it.
“Something brought him to her,” she said, wiping away tears. “We are forever grateful to him.”
katrinaclarke@thespec.com
905-526-4629 | @katrinaaclarke
katrinaclarke@thespec.com
905-526-4629 | @katrinaaclarke