A Massachusetts bride and several nurses at her wedding reception save a guest who has a heart attack on the dance floor. Micaela Johnson is an emergency room nurse at a Boston hospital and a number of her coworkers were in attendance at her wedding reception. So when a guest at her wedding reception suffered a major heart attack on the dance floor, he couldn’t have been in better company.
Micaela was dancing and realized something was wrong when someone started screaming for the band to stop playing. She immediately rushed to attend to the guest as did five other professional nurses at the reception. “He wasn't the right color, he wasn't breathing properly,” she recalls. “And so they went in and did a quick assessment and started doing CPR on him.”
The man had a blockage in his left anterior descending artery, often referred to as a “widow-maker” heart attack. Fortunately, he got immediate care and the venue had a defibrillator on hand. “It seemed like a very long time that we were working on him and doing CPR and getting shocked,” one nurse recalls. They kept the man alive until paramedics arrived and took him to a nearby hospital. They later learned that he regained consciousness in the ambulance. “He probably wouldn't be alive today, honestly, if it didn't happen at my wedding,” Micaela says