CPR is an indispensable skill everyone should learn

At the beginning of this month, we wrote about a woman who resuscitated her husband with CPR after he was struck by lightning on Eototo Road. We later learned that the person who performed this life-saving act was former Holy Cross Medical Center Cardiologist, Geilan Ismail, who told us she was struck during the incident as well, but didn’t immediately know what had happened to her and her husband after she came to.

“We were walking the dog, had just turned off of the easement we walk on into our driveway, and we let the dog off the leash. Next thing I knew, I sort of woke up thinking I’d broken my leg,” Ismail said. “I was not quite a month past a hip replacement on the left. And so I thought, ‘Oh my gosh — I’ve broken my leg through my prosthesis and fallen and broken my arm.’ I had severe pain in both my left arm and left leg. And I called for my husband and had no response.”

When she propped herself up on her right elbow she saw her husband, Alan

Mahrenholz, a sonographer who also worked at Holy Cross, unresponsive several feet in front of where he had been walking. “I could see Alan laid out on the ground, and as soon as I saw his clothes were blown off of him, I knew it had to have been a lightning strike,” she said. “I just learned that from advanced cardiac life support — that in a lightning strike, often the clothes are burned or tattered and cardiac arrest can occur.”

Once she realized her husband had no pulse and wasn’t breathing — the hallmarks of that condition — she said “it was almost like a light switch went on, and I was like, ‘I gotta do CPR. I just gotta do CPR.’”

She gave chest compressions with one arm and, in between, gave her husband life-saving breaths.

Both Ismail and her husband survived the ordeal — her with a black eye and her husband with some burns and residual nerve pain — but as you’ll read in Dr. Ismail’s letter in this week’s paper, one of her main takeaways from the event was how critical this basic life-saving technique was to prevent a much more serious outcome.

CPR, which stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, is one of the most commonly-heard of medical acronyms, and about 54 percent of Americans say they know how to do it, according to a 2018 survey by the New Cleveland Clinic. If that number is accurate, then that’s roughly 164 million people who know what to do when someone’s heart stops beating.

But CPR is often just the first step in saving someone’s life. Such was the case with Dr. Ismail and her husband. She said no more than a few minutes passed before those one-armed chest compressions and several rescue breaths restored her husband’s pulse and got him breathing again. When the heart stops, time is of the essence to avoid serious brain damage. But Ismail knew to then run into her house, grab her cell phone and call for medics, who provided further care. Some cases of cardiac arrest require the use of a defibrillator to administer an electric shock to a victim’s heart to restore a viable heart rhythm.

Ismail said she had performed cardiac evaluations on lightning strike victims previously, but only in a clinical setting. She had never treated one immediately following a strike, and saw firsthand how effective that skillset can prove to be in an emergency.

“One of the reasons why outcomes are so poor is because people don’t do CPR right away. I just feel so blessed that I knew what to do. My training kicked in and I knew what to do immediately,” she said. “He could not have been without a pulse at most for a few minutes, way under the 10-minute permanent brain injury level.”

For more information on CPR and ways to become certified to perform it, visit the Red Cross website at redcross.org/take-aclass/cpr/performing-cpr/cpr-steps.

By learning it, you might one day, too, save someone’s life. On the other hand, sharing this skill with someone else might save yours.