PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Every year, there are about 23,000 young students who have a sudden cardiac arrest. It is the leading cause of death for student-athletes. The one thing that can shock them back to life instantly is optional.

Only 16 states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring automatic external defibrillators, or AEDs, in every school. However, Arizona isn’t one of them.

We caught up with some Valley families fighting to change that.

Nathan Higuera collapsed during football practice at Coronado High School in Scottsdale last summer. Medics used an AED to revive him.

“I could not be here right now, you know?” he said.

That’s the message the American Heart Association or AHA and other survivors are pushing to spread awareness with a new bipartisan measure, the Access to AED Act. It would give student-athletes a fighting chance by freeing up federal grants for schools to buy AEDs, which can cost up to $2,000 each.

The National Institutes of Health says the survival rate for high school athletes who go into cardiac arrest is 68 percent. If an automated external defibrillator is used, that jumps to 80 percent. However, not every school in the country has an AED.

The devices are easy to use without training. You hit a button, and it walks you through everything you need to do with simple audible prompts. It quickly shocks the heart back into rhythm.

Arizona requires them at the dentist’s office and state buildings, like the capitol and all prisons, but not in our schools.

Families like Matt Midkiff’s know that’s a problem; some can’t afford to gamble on the outcome. “Pyper was in a drug-induced coma for four days,” Matt said.

His daughter, Pyper, collapsed playing club soccer in Mesa. He says she had no pulse and started turning blue, waiting on paramedics. “Ten plus minutes of CPR before she got an AED on her and we know that for every minute you wait for an AED, it decreases life expectancy by 10 percent,” Matt said.

Dr. Comilla Sasson with the American Heart Association says when it comes to cardiac arrest, time is brain function. Time means survival. “You have this 10-minute window really to make a huge impact on whether somebody is going to survive their cardiac arrest outside of the hospital,” she said.

Matt and his wife knew the odds were against them as Pyper coded repeatedly before making it to the hospital. “Wondering if she would wake up and if she did, would she have normal brain function was obviously the worst part,” he said.

Matt says doctors told them Pyper is in the rare 2 percent.

Pyper doesn’t remember much of that day. She knows that CPR and AED saved her life. “I think they should be on every school campus,” she said.

Her twin sister, Emeri, was later diagnosed with the same genetic condition, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, or HCM. Both now have internal pacemakers and defibrillators.

They were just in D.C., lobbying lawmakers. “To spread awareness that there should be AEDs everywhere because you never know who can have the condition or what might happen in the moment,” Emeri said.

Alex Bowerson also took his personal story of survival to congressional lawmakers. He collapsed at wrestling practice at his high school in Michigan. A cheer coach used an AED to shock him and save his life.

“It’s incredible that I survived,” Bowerson said. It’s incredible because he says the battery on his AED was down to just 11 percent.

A middle school student in Houston died this past August when his campus AED didn’t work. On top of that, further tests showed their schools had another 170 AEDs that didn’t have good batteries or pads. Safety advocates say it was a shocking wake-up call for responsibility and liability.

Sharon Bates runs the Anthony Bates Foundation. She named the charity after her son, who was a football player who had an undiagnosed heart condition and went into sudden cardiac arrest after practice and died.

Sharon now hosts low-cost preventive heart screenings for student athletes so families can get a simple baseline heart check, which would have spotted her son’s condition.

She says that until insurance and providers make that the new standard of care for any student-athlete, we need to expand access to AEDs, ensure people know where they are, and maintain the batteries and pads.

“Just like your fire extinguishers, there’s maintenance involved. You can’t just hang it on the wall,” Bates said.

Sharon says parents and coaches need access to all campus AEDs and know what to expect from away games and meets. “Be that parent who asks,” she said.

As it turns out, AEDs were available on the campus and athletic fields when Nathan and Pyper collapsed. At the former Legacy Sports Complex in Mesa, Matt says someone ran to grab an AED, but it wasn’t used in the chaos of the moment on Pyper.

Nathan Higuera’s athletic trainer, Tessa Powell, said there were two AEDs on campus that day, but neither was an option to save Nathan. “One was in the athletic training room but the only person that has access is me and security, and our second one is in the nurse’s office. That’s quite a ways away,” Powell said.

Sharon says schools need to have a plan and ensure every coach and parent of student-athletes knows where the AEDs are and how to access them in an emergency. “In Albuquerque, they took all their AEDs out of the schools because they did not want to maintain them; they didn’t have the budget,” Bates said.

“Where is the money going to come from if you have to pay for a funeral?” Mike Midkiff added.

Sharon also donates AEDs to schools and knows at least of three saves from devices she’s gifted to campuses in Arizona: a soccer official, a Glendale high school track star and another kid on the same campus.

“He had a sudden cardiac arrest after consuming four Monster energy drinks before he got to school,” Bates said.

Sharon hosted a screening event to honor Pyper and Emeri after their family scare, testing 132 kids and adults and finding five students who had serious underlying cardiac complications they didn’t know about.

One boy had the same condition as the twins, and Sharon’s son, HCM, was able to get in to see a specialist before he had an emergency on the field.

“I tell Pyper and Emeri, when I was 13 and 14, I wasn’t saving other people’s lives,” Matt Midkiff said.

“I’d love to see a world where every school has an AED within three minutes of anywhere,” Bowerson said.

When it comes to heart matters, beating the clock saves lives.