MILWAUKEE — When Joe Lemel saw Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapse on the field during Monday night’s game it instantly took him back to Jan. 22, 1999.
“It was too painful. I had to turn it off,” said Lemel. “I just couldn’t watch it.”
Joe Lemel lost his 17-year-old son Adam Lemel, who collapsed and died while playing basketball for Whitefish Bay, just over 20 years ago.
“The woman on the bench was right next to him and said, ‘I know CPR,’” said Joe Lemel. “‘Want me to start CPR?’ [she asked]. I yelled into the stands to call 911. It felt like it took an eternity.”
The school they were playing at did not have an automated external defibrillator. Once emergency medical services arrived, they used an AED on him multiple times in an attempt to save Adam Lemel’s life.
“You could just see the flatline,” said Joe Lemel. “They continued CPR and proceeded to give him another shock and another flatline.”
After a third shock, there was another flatline. EMS took him to a nearby hospital, but it was too late.
“When they just said there’s nothing they could do, it’s just impossible to describe what that feels like,” said Joe Lemel.
The heartache the Lemel family experienced was unimaginable: Their healthy and athletic son passed away unexpectedly from sudden cardiac arrest. They said they were left wondering if faster access to an AED would have saved his life.
They decided to create Project ADAM in his honor. The organization helps schools obtain AEDs and provides them with resources to help “implement the cardiac chain of survival.”
“At that time, there wasn’t AED equipment, or many people trained in CPR or AED skills,” Allison Thompson, with Children’s Wisconsin, explained. “So, the family and Children’s Hospital partnered up to create this outreach program.”
Thompson is the national and Wisconsin administrator for Project ADAM. Project ADAM started in Wisconsin and is now being implemented in 29 states across the country.
“Today we have over 200 lives that have been saved from implementing these programs and those are only the stories we’ve heard of,” said Thompson. “There’s been many, many more.”
Joe Lemel said he hopes Project ADAM spares other parents from undergoing the same tragedy he’s lived through and that schools are equipped to give students who have medical emergencies a chance at survival, something he said his son never had.
“Project ADAM is never about me,” said Joe Lemel. “It’s about people not being me.”
Joe Lemel said even though his son isn’t here, he and his family know Adam Lemel would be proud of the work they’ve done in his honor to ensure other students get that fighting chance.