‘ Second life’ for school worker
Principal trained in CPR is credited with keeping an employee alive
Elizabeth Vallejo was having a heart attack.
It was Leap Day, and Vallejo, who prepares food for students, had f inished her cafeteria shift at Hesby Oaks Leadership Charter in Encino. Around 1: 30 p. m., she walked over to her manager’s office to sign out, turned around to leave the room and fell to the ground.
Luckily for Vallejo, the school’s principal, Movses Tarakhchyan, used to be a lifeguard. On top of that, he required that the whole school receive CPR training over the summer, one of his f irst moves as the new principal.
Tarakhchyan got a radio call from his staff: There was an injury, and they needed him.
He ran to the cafeteria, he recalled, thinking a student might be hurt in a nearby PE class.
Instead, he found Vallejo on her back in the manager’s office, and it looked as if her mouth was slightly foaming. He thought she might be having a seizure, so he turned her on her side. Then he checked for a pulse but found none.
The school gets a nurse only twice a week, and Feb. 29 was not one of those days. So one employee called 911 and another ran to retrieve the automatic electronic defibrillator machine from the nurse’s office while Tarakhchyan began performing manual CPR, pushing Vallejo’s chest and checking for her pulse.
“It’s not like in the movies where after two, three pumps somebody wakes up,” he said. He thinks he performed CPR for a full five minutes, but it’s hard to say because it felt as if time had stopped, he said.
Tarakhchyan credits the defibrillator with saving Vallejo’s life.
There are 411 such machines distributed to more than 780 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. All schools built after 2014 have one, L. A. Unified spokesman Samuel Gilstrap said. The district does not have an estimate of how many schools have received CPR training. When schools request training, though, the districts helps.
When Tarakhchyan used the machine from Hesby Oaks, it couldn’t find a pulse, instead speaking out loud and telling him to shock Vallejo. He did, but three minutes later, the machine repeated, “No pulse found. Shock advised.” Tarakhchyan shocked her again.
Throughout the process, the principal says, he f lashed back to the last time he had tried to save a life. About four years ago, Tarakhchyan’s father died of a heart attack. Tarakhchyan had tried CPR, but it didn’t work. His family later found out the heart attack was so bad that the father probably died before he hit the ground.
Tarakhchyan didn’t think this time would be any different. Three minutes passed. The machine spoke again. “Pulse found.” Finally, the ambulance arrived.
The emergency medical technicians disconnected the machine and congratulated Tarakhchyan for keeping his employee alive.
Manuel Vallejo walked out of his storeroom shift at 3 p. m. expecting to see his wife, who usually picks him up. Instead he saw his 19year- old son. He had no cellphone service at work, so the school had called his older son in Northern California. All that was known was that Elizabeth Vallejo was in a hospital, that she’d had a heart attack.
Father and son rushed to Providence Tarzana Medical Center, where Elizabeth Vallejo was undergoing angioplasty, a surgery to unblock her arteries.
While the two waited, Vallejo’s manager told her husband what had happened. It felt like a punch in the gut, he said, as he wondered what would have happened if the heart attack had happened a few minutes later, while she was in the car, or when the principal wasn’t there or didn’t know how to perform CPR.
The doctor told Manuel Vallejo that his wife was lucky to be alive. The cardiologist who treated Elizabeth Vallejo, Dr. Daniel Manavi, confirmed that Tarakhchyan’s CPR saved her.
Manuel Vallejo met his wife in the Philippines, and the two moved to California in the 1980s. Here, they raised two sons, one of whom wants to be a nurse. For the two days when her health status was unclear, he slept for only about 45 minutes.
Elizabeth Vallejo doesn’t remember anything about the heart attack, other than waking up in the hospital. But talking about it weeks later, she cries.
“This is my second life,” she said over the phone, in between tears. “The principal, he didn’t give up.”