It was a truly heartbreaking moment for a New Hampshire nurse.
A nurse was in a training session to treat cardiac arrest when she herself experienced the life-threatening condition and her colleagues intervened to save her.
Andy Hoang, a first-year nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, recalled how she began to feel dizzy and sat up during the course in November.
“That’s the last thing I remember. “I woke up to a room full of doctors and nurses,” Hoang told the Associated Press.
His medical colleagues abandoned the mannequin and sprang into action with a real patient.
“One checked his carotid, another checked his femoral (arteries) and he had no pulse,” instructor Lisa Davenport said, adding that nurses began CPR and issued a dreaded “code blue” for an emergency team.
“The really stressful thing about the situation was that we never had an actual code blue downtown. “We train for them all the time,” Davenport added.
New Hampshire nurse Andy Hoang was saved by her colleagues when she went into cardiac arrest while learning how to treat it. AP nurse Andy Hoang was saved by her colleagues when she went into cardiac arrest while she was learning how to treat him. AP
In another stroke of luck, a nearby intensive care team quickly hooked Hoang up to a defibrillator to monitor her, inserted an IV and administered oxygen.
A doctor and another nurse ran in with so-called emergency carts, which are full of emergency equipment, while Hoang was already waking up in the emergency room after 15 terrifying minutes.
“It worked, but it was pretty scary for all of us,” Davenport said. “You just don’t expect that to happen to someone as young as Andy.”
“I woke up to a room full of doctors and nurses,” Hoang said after being saved. AP
Hoang, who has since returned to duty, agreed.
“I would say I’m a normal, healthy 23-year-old girl,” she said, adding that she exercises and eats well. “I’m on my feet 12 or 13 hours a day at work, so I want to make sure I’m in shape for that.”
Hoang added that before the day of the incident, he had also fainted a couple of times: the first time after not eating and his blood sugar level was low, and the second time when he experienced abdominal pain.
“So nothing like this, nothing to this point,” said the nurse, who grew up in Vietnam and came to the United States in 2016 as a student and earned her nursing degree from Michigan.
Hoang poses with coworkers Lisa Davenport, left, and Justina Terino. AP
Cardiac arrest (the sudden loss of heart function) causes more than 436,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to the American Heart Association.
It is different from a heart attack, which occurs when blood flow to the heart is blocked.
A person can go into cardiac arrest after having a heart attack, but other conditions can also alter the heart rhythm and lead to arrest, including thickening of the heart muscle or cardiomyopathy, according to the AHA.
The experience of defying death has strengthened her relationship with the other nurses, whom she now considers her best friends.
“We basically went through this whole life and death experience,” he said.
“It really changed my perspective on how I look at life, like ‘Hug your family a little bit more,'” Hoang said.
“Tell them you love them, because it might be the last time you tell them. And simply value life for what he has given you. “It’s precious and I didn’t realize how precious it was until I almost lost it,” she added.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn