FORT LORAMIE — There’s that old adage: What a difference a day makes.

For a Fort Loramie family, they could be saying, “What a difference a minute makes.”

In a single minute during a recent boys basketball game between teams from Fort Loramie and Anna high schools, and in another minute during a girls’ game between Fort Loramie and Miami East, more than $5,000 was raised.

The “miracle minutes,” as they were dubbed, were organized by former classmates of Clay Eilerman and his sister, Heather. Shelly Barhorst, a teacher at Fort Loramie High School, coordinated the project. At halftime of each game, they and several other volunteers passed 25-30 ice cream buckets up and down the aisles, collecting contributions to help with medical and travel expenses while a minute ticked down on the play clock.

Although the amounts raised were announced at the games, neither Barhorst nor Denise Eilerman, Clay’s mother, would say how much was donated.

“We did this last year for a student who has cancer and raised about $5,000. I can tell you it was way more than that,” Barhorst said.

“People were very generous between the Anna, Miami East, Fort Loramie and surrounding community,” said Denise.

“You saw everything from pennies to hundred dollar bills in the buckets,” Barhorst said.

Clay’s condition became apparent when, in November, he suffered a cardiac arrest at home. Denise, a nurse, administered CPR and the Fort Loramie police used an automated external defibrillator to get his heart to beat again. Then, he was taken by ambulance to Joint Township District Memorial Hospital in St. Marys.

From there he was flown first to Dayton Children’s Hospital and then to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

“They determined he needed to have a defibrillator implanted,” Denise said. “Shortly before Thanksgiving, he came home and was doing fine” — until Dec. 20, when the 18-year-old passed out and the defibrillator went off.

Clay was transported again to the hospital in St. Marys and again to Cincinnati Children’s.

“For 12 hours, he was fine,” his mother said. “Then his heart went back into ventricular fibrillation.”

“Ventricular fibrillation is a heart rhythm problem that occurs when the heart beats with rapid, erratic electrical impulses. This causes pumping chambers in your heart (the ventricles) to quiver uselessly, instead of pumping blood,” says the Mayo Clinic website.

It is the most serious cardiac rhythm disturbance, according to the American Heart Association.

“Many doctors and many nurses worked to stabilize him for surgery,” Denise said. Clay was then connected to an ECMO machine. The extracorporeal membrane oxygenation device pumps blood so the heart doesn’t have to. It gives the heart a chance to heal.

On Dec. 26, doctors closed Clay’s chest. But no one could say what was causing his problems. In January, he flew in a medical airplane to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for genetic testing. Doctors there took a strip of nerves from his spinal column that supplies adrenaline to the left side of his heart, preventing adrenaline from reaching that side.

A week later, Clay flew home commercially.

“He’s getting stronger every day,” Denise said. “He’s happy to be back out in the community.” Clay is enrolled in Ohio State University-Lima, but has taken this semester off to recover. He plans to return to school in the fall.

In addition to the donations from the Miracle Minutes, the family also has received a donation from Upper Valley Career Center, which Clay attended before his graduation last spring, and from many anonymous community members.

“It’s been very humbling to know there are a lot of people out there who care,” said Denise.