Nurse saved from cardiac arrest during training on life-threatening condition
It was a real heart-stopping moment for a New Hampshire nurse.
A nurse was at a training session for treating cardiac arrest when she experienced the life-threatening condition herself — and her colleagues jumped in 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 down 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.
Her medical colleagues ditched the mannequin and sprung into action with a real patient.
“One checked her carotid, one her femoral (arteries), and she did not have a pulse,” instructor Lisa Davenport said, adding that the nurses began CPR and issued a dreaded “code blue” for an emergency team.
“What was really stressful about the situation was that we never had a real code blue in the center. We train for them all the time,” Davenport added.
In another lucky break, a nearby critical care team quickly hooked Hoang up to a defibrillator for monitoring, inserted an IV line and placed her on oxygen.
A doctor and another nurse then rushed in with so-called crash carts, which are filled with emergency equipment, while Hoang was already waking up in the ER after a scary 15 minutes.
“It worked out, but it was pretty frightening for all of us,” Davenport said. “You just don’t expect that to happen with someone as young as Andy.”
Hoang, who has since returned to duty, agreed.
“I would say I’m your pretty average healthy 23-year-old,” she said, adding that she works out and eats well. “I’m on my feet 12, 13 hours a day at work, so I want to make sure that I’m in shape for that.”
Hoang added that that before the day of the incident, she had also passed out a couple of times – the first after she hadn’t eaten and her blood sugar was low, and the second when she experienced abdominal pain.
“So, nothing like this, nothing to this extent,” said the nurse, who grew up in Vietnam and came to the US in 2016 as a student and got her nursing degree in Michigan.
Cardiac arrest — the sudden loss of heart function — causes more than 436,000 deaths in the US every year, according to the American Heart Association.
It is different from a heart attack, which happens when blood flow to the heart is blocked.
A person can suffer cardiac arrest after having a heart attack, but other conditions can also disrupt the heart’s rhythm and lead to arrest, including having a thickened heart muscle or cardiomyopathy, according to the AHA.
The death-defying experience has strengthened her relationship with the other nurses, whom she now considers her best friends.
“We basically went through this whole life-or-death experience,” she said.
“It really changed my perspective on how I view life, like ‘Hug your family a little longer,’” Hoang said.
“Tell them that you love them, because it might be the last time you get to say it to them. And just cherish life for what you’ve been given. It’s precious, and I didn’t realize how precious it was until I nearly lost it,” she added.
