MACON, Ga. — In the last four days, two Macon college students have died playing sports. Last night at Mercer University Mason Sells collapsed during an intramural soccer game. Later, he was pronounced dead at Atrium Health Navicent.
Sells was a junior studying accounting, and a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Jacob Woods said his friend Mason Sells was like a little brother to him.
"He was probably one of the most levelheaded, strong people I've ever met,” Woods said. “I felt like he always had the right things to say. His love that he had for the people he cared about was like no other."
On Monday night, Sells collapsed after being hit by a soccer ball. An ambulance rushed Sells to Atrium Health Navicent in Macon where he was pronounced dead around 9:30 pm. Bibb County's coroner said he died from a cardiac arrest.
Cardiac Electrophysiologist Joseph Poku said anywhere people exercise there should be someone who knows CPR and an automated external defibrillator.
"The truth of the matter is that most out of hospital cardiac arrest patients actually don't survive,” Poku said. “The mortality is actually very, very high. But if you had an AED available, that would drastically change your mortality."
Poku said when a person collapses, you have only a few minutes to perform CPR or use an AED. He said people don't expect a health emergency like this, but you can take some preventative measures.
"Know your family history,” he said. “Do not ignore if you have palpitations, do not ignore things when you get lightheaded, do not ignore it when you have chest pain and certainly do not ignore your symptoms if you've actually passed out or have come close to passing out. Because these may be early signs of something ominous down the road."
Poku said vaccines do not play a role in cardiac arrests and sudden death from sports.
"Certainly someone that has a heart that's acutely inflamed from a virus can also have a sudden cardiac death," Poku said. "That could also lead to sudden cardiac death because sometimes the inflammation can cause the heart muscle to weaken. But whether or not these vaccines cause that has been debunked in the literature and this has been studied in millions of patients actually. When you pull data globally together, there really appears to be no real association between vaccines and sudden death or even vaccine and cardiomyopathies in general."
Mercer University declined to comment on if there was an automated external defibrillator near the soccer field. They said they are still gathering details about what happened.