STANWOOD — It happened unexpectedly.
“He played basketball, very competitively. He was invited to the Top 40 in Washington State,” Jessica Gilman said. “It was three days after he passed away.”
At just 15, Dillon Gilman lost his life to sudden cardiac arrest in 2024. His best friend Hailey Smith, 15, said it was “heartbreaking and scary.”
“We did get in an argument that morning, so that was our last conversation,” she said. “So that’s kind of hard to live with.”
Dillon was born with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition where the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick. Unfortunately, he passed every sports physical he ever went through, Gilman said.
“You can’t catch it if you don’t do something more in-depth,” she said, “and the sports physicals are just not at that level.”
To honor Dillon’s memory, the Stanwood-Camano School District partnered with the Nick of Time Foundation to bring free electrocardiogram heart screenings to Stanwood High School on Wednesday. Over 750 children signed up, according to the foundation’s Executive Director Darla Varrenti, and about 700 were screened.
That is more students than any other event put on by Nick of Time. The previous record was 680 screenings at a single event, school district spokesperson Evan Caldwell said in an email.
“This community has rallied around the Gilman family,” Varrenti told The Herald at the event. “Dylan was, I think, very well loved and it shows.”
The Nick of Time Foundation was created in 2006 in honor of Varrenti’s son Nick, who died from sudden cardiac arrest at age 16.
“We’re not doing enough to check the kids’ hearts,” she said. During most check-ups or sports physicals, doctors only listen to the heart with a stethoscope and ask about symptoms. “The things that cause sudden cardiac arrest in young people are electrical and structural in nature, and you can’t pick that up on a stethoscope,” Varrenti said.
During a Nick of Time event, students discuss their heart and general health with doctors and receive an EKG, a test that records the heart’s electrical activity. Doctors review the EKG results and determine if any further action is necessary.
If needed, the student can also receive a short ultrasound of the heart called an echocardiogram. If the doctors find anything, they call the parents, and the foundation can arrange an expert follow-up, said Jonathan Drezner, Nick of Time medical director and the director for the Center for Sports Cardiology at University of Washington Medicine.
“Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of sudden death in young athletes. It’s one of the leading causes of sudden death in just young persons,” he said. “The typical heart evaluation you have with your pediatrician or family doctor really just doesn’t do this.”
Many family doctors and sports medicine doctors are not trained to interpret EKG results, Drezner said. “Education and training becomes a big part of this, to make it more widely available,” he said.
However, heart screens are becoming more readily available for college and professional athletes, Drezner said. “It’s a matter of when that can infiltrate downward as we grow more of a foundation and infrastructure to do it at other levels.”
One hundred and fifty volunteers, including doctors, helped the heart screens run smoothly in Stanwood, Varrenti said.
“I still am overwhelmed by the amount of people that support us and the community support that we get when we go into communities. It’s just amazing,” she said.
It was the foundation’s first event in the city, and the school district was “amazing to work with,” Varrenti said. “They bent over backwards for us.”
In total, the medical staff recommended six young people seek additional testing for possible heart conditions, Caldwell said.
While finding children who might have heart issues is the point of the event, it is bittersweet, Varrenti said.
“You want to find somebody, but yet you don’t want to find somebody, because you’re changing their life,” she said.
Gilman said it’s difficult to watch children cry when they find out something might be wrong, but “knowing that my child’s life saved another child’s life potentially, is very impactful.”
Hailey received a heart screening in May at Lynnwood High School, she said.
“It was nice to know that I didn’t have anything and I was doing it for Dylan,” she said. “It was scary when I had to get scanned twice, but other than that it was nice.”
On Wednesday, seeing so many people getting heart screenings — all of them there because of Dylan — felt like closure, Hailey said.
The foundation travels to different high schools and offers free heart screenings almost every month. The next event is on Wednesday Nov. 5 at King’s High School, 19531 Dayton Ave. North in Shoreline. All children ages 12-24 can be screened no matter where they go to school.
The foundation also offers two weekend events throughout the year. The Seahawks will host the next one, which takes place Saturday Feb. 28 at the Virginia Mason Athletic Complex, 12 Seahawks Way in Renton.
Parents need to register at nickoftimefoundation.org.