Teen’s heart stops at softball game

An Auckland mum watched from the softball dugout as an umpire took 20 minutes and five defibrillator shocks to revive her son.

Oliver ‘‘Ollie’’ Tainui, 17, went into cardiac arrest during his team’s first softball game of the season at Papakura’s Prince Edward Park on Saturday.

‘‘The ball came towards him and he just stood there,’’ mum Lea Tainui said of the moment she realised something was wrong. ‘‘Nobody knew what was going on. He said to someone in the outfield ‘I can’t see’ and started walking to the dugout.’’

As his team-mates went to help, Oliver sat down and then suddenly fell back, she said.

Lea Tainui said umpire Tamati Montgomery saved her son by performing CPR until St John ambulance arrived.

‘‘We are totally indebted to him,’’ she said.

Ollie, a student at Wesley College, was recovering at Middlemore Hospital.

But Tainui said she was convinced things would have turned out differently if he had suffered a cardiac arrest at their rural home.

‘‘Somebody was trained in CPR and we were close to where the ambulance was at the time. [Those were] the two factors that helped save him basically.’’

Doctors had told the family it was a matter of ‘‘when’’ rather than ‘‘if’’ he would go into cardiac arrest.

‘‘This seems to be an underlying thing we did not know about.’’

Although Ollie was awake and talking, doctors were still working to determine the cause behind his cardiac arrest, Tainui said.

‘‘They’ve done a few tests, but are not too sure what’s wrong.

Tainui was grateful to her son’s team-mates and paramedics for helping to save his life.

Montgomery has been labelled a hero for performing CPR on Ollie. ‘‘I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all,’’ he said.

In his 18 years of being trained in first-aid, Montgomery said it was the first time he had performed CPR. He said he saw Ollie was struggling and performed chest compressions while following the instructions of emergency services on the phone.

He knew Ollie was going to be OK when St John arrived and he was breathing on his own. ‘‘My only concern was for him and his mum. I’ve got a son a similar age and if that was my son and I wasn’t there, hopefully someone would be able to do the same thing.’’