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On His Way To A PR, A Marathoner Collapsed At Mile 26
Brian Metzler
Dec 19, 2022
Aaron Kuen was en route to a 2:48 marathon at the California International Marathon, but remains in a coma in a Sacramento hospital
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Rhabdomyolysis is very common, but it usually presents as muscular soreness in the hours and days after intense physical exertion, said Dr. Katren Tyler, Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at University of California, Davis, who was the acute care director for the race.
“There is nobody who has run a marathon who hasn’t had some small component of rhabdomyolysis,” Tyler said. “Getting such severe rhabdo in only three hours and being severe enough to give you cardiac arrest is very unusual.”
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After a battery of tests during the first several days in the hospital, doctors determined that Aaron had suffered from the quick onset of rhabdomyolysis. That condition strained his kidneys and threw off the electromagnetic signals in his heart, sending him into cardiac arrest and causing his heart to stop beating.
In the ensuing days, the medical team at Sutter Medical Center administered an MRI and additional scans, determining he had suffered a severe hypoxic ischemic brain injury due to a lack of oxygen circulation when he wasn’t breathing. Doctors told Augustina that Aaron’s kidneys, liver and heart recovered from the rhabdomyolysis fairly quickly, but there has been no noticeable change in the significant brain trauma he suffered.
“It really was a freak event in his body,” Augustina said. “He has no underlying health conditions, no means for this to have happened. One of the nurses told me ‘he has a runner’s heart’ and … I had to chuckle … because it’s true. He’s so healthy and fit.”
On December 11-12, Aaron underwent tracheostomy and percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy procedures to insert a feeding tube into his stomach. After 10 days at the Sutter Medical Center, he was transferred on December 15 to the intensive care unit at Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center for an evaluation period.
“This kind of thing rocks you,” Abbott said. “He was well-prepared for this event. He went out and trained his butt off and was executing a masterful race and was running 6:20 miles right up to the moment he collapsed. Sometimes when you see cardiac arrests in a race, there are underlying health conditions there. You find out later there were clogged arteries and that kind of thing could have happened mowing the lawn or anywhere. But this is a case that rocks a lot of people because it’s almost like getting struck by lightning.”...