It’s called the Widow Maker. A sudden heart attack that comes with an estimated survival rate of just 10 to 20 percent. As a pediatric nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Allison Kleinschmidt, ’12, handles a wide array of health issues every day with children. But she wasn’t in her scrubs or working a shift when Allison came face to face with the Widow Maker.

She was at her family home in Delaware. Most of her family was on vacation at the shore that Thursday morning. “I live in Philly currently, I just happened to be home for a couple of days,” Allison said. “Then my dad knocked on my bedroom door and let me know that something wasn’t right.”

As the president of the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, Allison’s father, Mark Kleinschmidt, was home to get some work done. “It was a hot day,” he recalled. “I ran four and a half miles. I came home. I had breakfast.” That’s when, he said, he proceeded to have a heart attack. “I was experiencing severe chest pains at that point,” he explained. “So, I sat down for about 10 minutes hoping that it would go away.” Unfortunately, the pain only grew worse.

Luckily, Mark was able to get himself to his daughter’s bedroom door. He recalled, “I knocked and said, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack. You have to call 911.” That’s when Allison’s training and expertise kicked in. She brought her dad back to his room where she was able to give him Asprin and call 911. “I began CPR,” she explained, “…but it took the ambulance a little bit longer to get to us.” Allison continued to perform CPR on her father for twenty minutes until the paramedics arrived.

When the ambulance arrived, they connected Mark to a defibrillator to trace what his heart rhythms were and ended up having to shock him a total of seven times. Finally, Mark responded. “They got him on a stretcher and continued CPR on route to the hospital,” Allison said. There, the doctors placed a stent in Mark’s heart.

Allison graduated with her BSN in Nursing from La Salle in 2012. But over the 28 days Mark was in the hospital, he says he took quite the crash course in cardiac terminology. “They placed the stent in the lower left anterior descending artery,” he said. “This type of heart attack is called the Widow Maker. All of the doctors and the EMTs said that, by all rights, I should have died. But because of the CPR that Allie had given me, it kept the blood flowing to my heart and that’s what kept me alive.”

Allison says she never anticipated using her nursing skills to help save her own father. But, when the time came, her training kicked in and she knew what she needed to do. “Everyone says it must have been so strange doing it on your dad,” she said.

“But I feel like I went right into nurse mode.” As a neonatal nurse, Allison says that the hardest part wasn’t the duration of performing CPR, it was handling an adult male patient alone. “I perform CPR on babies that are sometimes less than a pound,” she said. “Trying to get my dad off of the chair and onto the ground was the hardest part, honestly… Usually you’re not alone. You have another person who would switch off with you, doing the compressions and the breath. It was definitely longer than any kind of training I’ve ever had. … But, I could have done the compressions forever if I had to.”

After nearly a month in a hospital bed, Mark spent the next few months in physical therapy and rehabilitation. But, beating the odds, by the end of the year, he was feeling back to himself again, exclaiming, “I made a goal for myself to run a 5K on New Year’s Day, which I did—in 9 degrees!”

“It was a great outcome,” Allison said, looking back. Through all of her education, she credits the first two years of nursing school for laying such a strong foundation of the basics for her, including CPR. When asked what it’s like as a father to have your daughter being the one who saves you, Mark simply said, “My heart stops again. It’s just incredible that she was home, that she was even there, and that she was able to do it for so long.”

With the experience now behind them, Mark is grateful to not only have survived, but to have done so with no brain damage or trauma—all thanks to Allison.

“It’s kind of emotional,” he said. “She really is my lifesaver.”