Washington State coach has defibrillator implanted

June Daugherty was saved from cardiac arrest and death through extraordinary fortune on Tuesday. Now she begins life with the defibrillator that doctors installed in her chest on Thursday.

She can ask Kayla Burt for advice.

Daugherty, Washington State’s women’s basketball coach, and Burt, her former player at Washington, share the same rare condition: cardiomyopathy. Both went into cardiac arrest. Both were seconds from dying. Yet both are alive and in basketball.

“To see Coach and be on this end of things is unbelievable to me,” said Burt, now an assistant coach at the University of Portland, Ore.

She dropped everything Tuesday night when she got a call that Daugherty had collapsed. Burt rushed to see her former coach at Providence Everett Medical Center, north of Seattle.

“When these things happen, you can’t help but think there’s something bigger than us that had a hand in [saving her],” Burt said Thursday at a news conference at the hospital, hours after Daugherty joined Burt as a defibrillator recipient.

Doctors implanted the device in Daugherty’s chest just under the skin to monitor her heart beat and restore it, if necessary. They expect her to be released from the hospital within a couple days and to recover fully. They also expect her to resume her duties as the Cougars’ coach well before the season begins this fall.

Mahesh Mulumudi, an interventional cardiologist at the Everett Clinic who performed the defibrillator procedure, said Daugherty’s collapse “was a totally random thing” based on her cardiomyopathy condition. It was not related to a stress test she took on Monday, or to artery blockage.

“In a couple weeks, she can do pretty much anything she wants,” Mulumudi said. “She’s doing so well I think she’ll be out in a couple days.”